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Roundtable on Growth, Jobs and Distribution

Four years after the onset of the financial crisis, the advanced economies are still struggling to revive growth, improve job prospects and contain worsening income distributions. At the same time, the East Asian growth engine is showing signs of strain, and developing economies are wondering whether the export oriented development strategies predicated on robust global demand, will continue to deliver the desired economic outcomes.
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Policy discussions once reserved for emerging economies, such as the necessity of creating jobs, industrial restructuring, and tightening fiscal management are now the daily preoccupation of decision makers in the OECD. At the core of the policy dilemma for countries drawn from a broad spectrum, is the relationship between growth, jobs, and distribution.

What has been relatively neglected to date is a systematic discussion of the linkages among the three phenomena of low growth, weak job creation, and worsening inequality in the US. The US context, although by no means indicative of the entire OECD experience, is relevant for others with broadly similar systems and in comparable predicaments. Furthermore, because policies pursued by the US have ramifications globally, the US experience is doubly relevant.

Partners

The purpose of this roundtable is bringing together academics and practitioners to exchange thoughts on the political economy of short and long term initiatives that can effectively break a downward cycle of economic trends in advanced economies, and in-so-doing, provide new insights for other less advanced economies.

The triad of issues of growth, jobs and distribution, drawing upon existing empirical evidence, will be discussed. In addition, areas for further work will be identified and some preliminary conclusions drawn that can assist other less advanced countries facing similar challenges.

Based on further research and analysis, the Growth Dialogue and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue will, with the collaboration of the World Bank and other affiliated institutions, begin to organize a series of policy debates and conversations to be attended by policymakers from a range of countries. The plan is to increase exposure and knowledge of the tradeoffs and challenges that lie in the path of those who seek to increase economic growth, while improving job prospects and maintaining reasonable sharing of the gains of development. While this is not a new challenge, we believe that the global environment has made these objectives both more urgent and harder to achieve and we hope to deepen insights into the management of these issues.

  • David Autor
    Speaker
    Associate Department Head
    Department of Economics
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Steven Kapsos
    Speaker
    Labour Economist
    International Labor Organization
  • James Foster
    Speaker
    Director
    Institute for International Economic Policy
    Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
  • Jaime Saavedra
    Speaker
    Director
    Poverty Reduction and Equity Department
    The World Bank
  • Ian Coxhead
    Commentator
    Chair
    Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics
    University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Krishna Guha
    Commentator
    Executive Vice President
    Federal Reserve Bank of New York
  • Andres Solimano
    Commentator
    International Center for Globalization and Development
  • Peter Howitt
    Speaker
    Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences
    Department of Economics
    Brown University
  • Bilge Erten
    Partner
    Postdoctoral Research Scholar
    Committee on Global Thought
    Columbia University
  • Stephany Griffith-Jones
    IPD Staff
    Financial Markets Program Director
    Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD)
  • Mildred Menos
    IPD Staff
    Program Manager
    Initiative for Policy Dialogue
    Columbia University
  • Andrew Clark
    Partner
    Head
    Growth and Resilience Team
    Department for International Development (DFID), United Kingdom
  • Kate Higgins
    Partner
    Head
    Governance for Equitable Growth
    North-South Institute, Canada
  • Yue Li
    Partner
    Core Team Member of the 2013 World Development Report
    World Development Report
    The World Bank
  • Helen Neuborne
    Partner
    Director
    Quality Employment
    Ford Foundation, USA
  • Hossein Rostami
    Partner
    Director
    Canadian International Development Agency (CDIA)
  • Sachin Anand
    Other
    Research Associate
    The Growth Dialogue, George Washington University
  • Erika Baty
    Other
    Project Coordinator
    The Growth Dialogue, George Washington University
  • Ines Garcia
    Other
    Director of Operations
    The Growth Dialogue, George Washington University
  • Diana Manevskaya
    Other
    Communications Manager
    The Growth Dialogue, George Washington University
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