The Covid 19 pandemic has caused both a decrease in tax revenues and an increase in public spending, forcing governments to increase fiscal deficits to unprecedented levels. Given these circumstances, it is foreseeable that fiscal rules will play a predominant role in the design of many countries' recovery policies. We develop a general equilibrium, overlapping generations model for a small, open economy in order to study the impact of several fiscal rules upon welfare, public expenditures and growth. We calibrate the model to the Peruvian economy. In this economy, fiscal rules have been widely used and, unlike in other Latin American countries, they have been relatively successful. We find that fiscal rules will generate better results in terms of output if, in addition to maintaining control over the fiscal result, they also preserve public investment. We also find that the performance of economies that implement structural rules tends to be better than the performance of economies that implement rules based on realized budget balance.

The spread of COVID-19 led countries around the world to adopt lockdown measures of varying stringency, with the purpose of restricting the movement of people. However, the effectiveness of these measures on mobility has been markedly different. Employing a difference-in-differences design, we analyse the effectiveness of movement restrictions across different countries. We disentangle the role of regulation (stringency measures) from the role of people's knowledge about the spread of COVID-19. We proxy COVID-19 knowledge by using Google Trends data on the term "Covid". We find that lockdown measures have a higher impact on mobility the more people learn about COVID-19. This finding is driven by countries with low levels of trust in institutions and low levels of education.

The financial crisis from 2007 and, even more so, the Covid-19 pandemic caused large increases in public sector deficits and debts in many countries and prompted concern about fiscal adjustment. This paper examines fiscal adjustment to debt and deficits for a panel of 17 countries over 1870-2016 using the Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database. This long span panel is informative since it contains many examples of large fiscal shocks similar to those recently experienced. The results from reduced-form models suggest that large deficits or surpluses tend to prompt stabilising feedbacks, mainly through changes in revenue, and there is greater pressure to adjust on countries running a deficit versus those running a surplus. However, the debt-GDP ratio prompts much less stabilising feedback by expenditure or revenue.

We provide evidence on the link between the policy response to the SARS CoV-2 pandemic and conflicts worldwide. We combine daily information on conflict events and government policy responses to limit the spread of SARS CoV-2 to study how demonstrations and violent events vary following shutdown policies. We use the staggered implementation of restriction policies across countries to identify the dynamic effects in an event study framework. Our results show that imposing a nation-wide shutdown is associated with a reduction in the number of demonstrations, which suggests that public demonstrations are hampered by the rising cost of participation. However, the reduction is short-lived, as the number of demonstrations are back to their pre-restriction levels in two months. In contrast, we observe that the purported increase in mobilization or coordination costs, following the imposition of restrictions, is not followed by a drop of violent events that involve organized armed groups. Instead, we find that the number of events, on average, increases slightly following the implementation of the restriction policies. The rise in violent events is most prominent in poorer countries, with higher levels of polarization, and in authoritarian countries. We discuss the potential channels underlying this heterogeneity.

We find that a cross-country model of economic growth successfully tracks the growth takeoffs in China and India. The major drivers of the predicted takeoffs are improved health, increased openness to trade, and a rising labor force-to-population ratio due to fertility decline. We also explore the effect of the reallocation of labor from low-productivity agriculture to the higher-productivity industry and service sectors. Including the money value of longevity improvements in a measure of full income reduces the gap between the magnitude of China's takeoff relative to India's due to the relative stagnation in life expectancy in China since 1980.

"Using the Kakwani interpolation method to reconstruct rural and urban size distributions, the authors present Lorenz curve estimates for Chinese income distribution by period, 1952-1986. The level of inequality is one of the lowest in the world. The change in inequality over time conforms to the experience of other less-developed countries. Although rural inequality increased after 1978, national inequality fell, due to a reduction in the rural-urban income gap."