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Stealth war : how China took over while America's elite slept
\"China expert Robert Spalding reveals the shocking success China has had infiltrating American institutions and compromising our national security. The media often suggest that Russia poses the greatest threat to America's national security, but the real danger lies farther east. While those in power have been distracted and disorderly, China has waged a six-front war on America's economy, military, diplomacy, technology, education, and infrastructure -- and they're winning. It's almost too late to undo the shocking, though nearly invisible, victories of the Chinese. In Stealth War, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding reveals China's motives and secret attacks on the West. Chronicling how our leaders have failed to protect us over recent decades, he provides shocking evidence of some of China's most brilliant ploys, including: Placing Confucius Institutes in universities across the United States that serve to monitor and control Chinese students on campus and spread communist narratives to unsuspecting American students. Offering enormous sums to American experts who create investment funds that funnel technology to China. Signing a thirty-year agreement with the US that allows China to share peaceful nuclear technology, ensuring that they have access to American nuclear know-how. Spalding's concern isn't merely that America could lose its position on the world stage. More urgently, the Chinese Communist Party has a fundamental loathing of the legal protections America grants its people and seeks to create a world without those rights. Despite all the damage done so far, Spalding shows how it's still possible for the U.S. and the rest of the free world to combat -- and win -- China's stealth war\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Quantitative Spatial Economics
The observed uneven distribution of economic activity across space is influenced by variation in exogenous geographical characteristics and endogenous interactions between agents in goods and factor markets. Until the past decade, the theoretical literature on economic geography had focused on stylized settings that could not easily be taken to the data. This article reviews more recent research that has developed quantitative models of economic geography. These models are rich enough to speak to first-order features of the data, such as many heterogeneous locations and gravity equation relationships for trade and commuting. At the same time, these models are sufficiently tractable to undertake realistic counterfactual exercises to study the effect of changes in amenities, productivity, and public policy interventions such as transport infrastructure investments. We provide an extensive taxonomy of the different building blocks of these quantitative spatial models and discuss their main properties and quantification.
Journal Article
A comparative analysis of COVID-19 and global financial crises: evidence from US economy
The COVID-19 crisis has had deep adverse effects on a global level, affecting many economies and worsening their conditions which may have led to severe recession or even depression. The numbers of positive cases have risen sharply over the last few months, and the fatalities have also reached their peak. This study aims to examine the impact of the global financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic on the macroeconomic variables of the US economy. It also provides an understanding in a descriptive format, to analyze and compare the global financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, in a tabulated and graphical format. For analysis purposes, the tables and average method have been used. For the graphical formats, charts have been used for the later year of 2008, and the beginning of the 2009 global financial crisis. The first six months of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have also been taken into consideration. The results have confirmed that the current COVID-19 pandemic shows more severity in terms of economic activity, than the global financial crisis had experienced. Moreover, the impact of the crisis on the recession probabilities in the current pandemic is lower than that at the time of the global financial crisis.
Journal Article
Global patterns of daily CO2 emissions reductions in the first year of COVID-19
Day-to-day changes in CO2 emissions from human activities, in particular fossil-fuel combustion and cement production, reflect a complex balance of influences from seasonality, working days, weather and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we provide a daily CO2 emissions dataset for the whole year of 2020, calculated from inventory and near-real-time activity data. We find a global reduction of 6.3% (2,232 MtCO2) in CO2 emissions compared with 2019. The drop in daily emissions during the first part of the year resulted from reduced global economic activity due to the pandemic lockdowns, including a large decrease in emissions from the transportation sector. However, daily CO2 emissions gradually recovered towards 2019 levels from late April with the partial reopening of economic activity. Subsequent waves of lockdowns in late 2020 continued to cause smaller CO2 reductions, primarily in western countries. The extraordinary fall in emissions during 2020 is similar in magnitude to the sustained annual emissions reductions necessary to limit global warming at 1.5 °C. This underscores the magnitude and speed at which the energy transition needs to advance.
Journal Article
Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: Evidence from the 1918 Flu
We study the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on mortality and economic activity across U.S. cities during the 1918 Flu Pandemic. The combination of fast and stringent NPIs reduced peak mortality by 50 percent and cumulative excess mortality by 24 to 34 percent. However, while the pandemic itself was associated with short-run economic disruptions, we find that these disruptions were similar across cities with strict and lenient NPIs. NPIs also did not worsen medium-run economic outcomes. Our findings indicate that NPIs can reduce disease transmission without further depressing economic activity, a finding also reflected in discussions in contemporary newspapers.
Journal Article
On the notion of regional economic resilience
Over the past few years a new buzzword has entered academic, political and public discourse: the notion of resilience, a term invoked to describe how an entity or system responds to shocks and disturbances. Although the concept has been used for some time in ecology and psychology, it is now invoked in diverse contexts, both as a perceived (and typically positive) attribute of an object, entity or system and, more normatively, as a desired feature that should somehow be promoted or fostered. As part of this development, the notion of resilience is rapidly becoming part of the conceptual and analytical lexicon of regional and local economic studies: there is increasing interest in the resilience of regional, local and urban economies. Further, resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea ‘whose time has come’ in policy debates: a new imperative of ‘constructing’ or ‘building’ regional and urban economic resilience is gaining currency. However, this rush to use the idea of regional and local economic resilience in policy circles has arguably run somewhat ahead of our understanding of the concept. There is still considerable ambiguity about what, precisely, is meant by the notion of regional economic resilience, about how it should be conceptualized and measured, what its determinants are, and how it links to patterns of long-run regional growth. The aim of this article is to address these and related questions on the meaning and explanation of regional economic resilience and thereby to outline the directions of a research agenda.
Journal Article
THE ECONOMICS OF DENSITY: EVIDENCE FROM THE BERLIN WALL
This paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to commuting decisions, which yield a gravity equation for commuting flows. To structurally estimate agglomeration and dispersion forces, we use data on thousands of city blocks in Berlin for 1936, 1986, and 2006 and exogenous variation from the city's division and reunification. We estimate substantial and highly localized production and residential externalities. We show that the model with the estimated agglomeration parameters can account both qualitatively and quantitatively for the observed changes in city structure. We show how our quantitative framework can be used to undertake counterfactuals for changes in the organization of economic activity within cities in response, for example, to changes in the transport network.
Journal Article
Systemic risks from climate-related disruptions at ports
Disruptions to ports from climate extremes can have systemic impacts on global shipping, trade and supply chains. By combining estimated climatic-related port downtime at 1,320 ports with a global model of transport flows, we pinpoint systemic risks to global maritime transport, trade and supply-chain networks. We estimate a total of US$81 billion of global trade and at least US$122 billion of economic activity being at-risk on average annually.Climate-induced extreme events could disrupt the operation of ports globally, which could affect maritime transport, trade and supply chains. The authors estimate wider impact on the trade and economic activities across different sectors, finding that globally large economic cost is at-risk.
Journal Article
Sustainable economic activities, climate change, and carbon risk: an international evidence
The employment of renewable resources and their association with the real economy’s growth in mitigating the problem of carbon emission risk has been debated in the literature in a specific group of countries and regions. However, their relations and effects for a better sustainable energy transmission would need further research works in an international context. Motivated by that reason, this study contributes to the ongoing literature by revisiting the effects of renewable energy consumption, electricity output, and economic activities on carbon risk using a global sample of 219 countries over the period of 1990–2020. Using GMM estimation, simultaneous quantile, and panel quantile estimations; the study finds supportive findings showing that the higher the countries with renewable energy consumption and electricity output the better the capacity those countries can mitigate the environmental degradation by reducing the amount of total carbon emission over time. However, those relations are changed when using system GMM approaches, implying the role of FDI inflows and the difference in income groups in the selected sample countries. This can be intuitively explained that emerging countries might give more priority to the economic growth receiving FDI inflows from more advanced economies and balancing the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection, while the developed economies with their advantages in green technologies and financial flexibility might have higher advantages in acquiring a sustainable transition and maintaining the real economy’s growth without significant trade-off concerns. Finally, the study provides important policy implications and avenues for further research.
Journal Article
ECONOMIC ACTIVITY AND THE SPREAD OF VIRAL DISEASES
Viruses are a major threat to human health, and—given that they spread through social interactions—represent a costly externality. This article addresses three main questions: (i) what are the unintended consequences of economic activity on the spread of infections; (ii) how efficient are measures that limit interpersonal contacts; (iii) how do we allocate our scarce resources to limit the spread of infections? To answer these questions, we use novel high frequency data from France on the incidence of a number of viral diseases across space, for different age groups, over a quarter of a century. We use quasi-experimental variation to evaluate the importance of policies reducing interpersonal contacts such as school closures or the closure of public transportation networks. While these policies significantly reduce disease prevalence, we find that they are not cost-effective. We find that expansions of transportation networks have significant health costs in increasing the spread of viruses, and that propagation rates are pro-cyclically sensitive to economic conditions and increase with inter-regional trade.
Journal Article