Funding for public education is being devastated by the pandemic and economic crisis. In this report, PERI researcher Gerald Epstein develops a specific proposal for the Federal Reserve to inject massive levels of emergency funding needed to keep public education institutions afloat at all levels during the crisis. What Epstein terms the Federal Reserve Public Education Emergency Finance Facility would enable state governments to borrow through newly created human capital bonds, and thereby avoid their existing balanced-budget mandates. This Fed funding would constitute a relatively modest intervention compared with the $6 trillion it has already committed to bailing out Wall Street.
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Fair and Sustainable Recovery for California
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated severe public health and economic impacts in California, as elsewhere. This report by PERI Co-Director Robert Pollin proposes a California recovery program that is capable of exerting an effective counterforce against the state’s economic collapse in the short run while also building a durable foundation for an economically viable and ecologically sustainable longer-term recovery. This anti-austerity recovery agenda includes the following: establishing effective public health interventions; clean energy investments and high-road job creation; upgrading California’s public infrastructure; just transition for all displaced workers; and financing a sustainable recovery.
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Expanding Public Investment in Home Health Care
This paper by PERI researcher Lenore Palladino examines the impacts of a large-scale public investment expansion in home health care. Palladino describes how home health care—to the elderly and those with chronic health conditions—has been growing in importance due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet home health care workers remain chronically underpaid and neglected. Palladino finds that public investment in the home health care industry can stabilize employment for millions of low-income women, raise public health standards, and also enhance employment conditions in other areas where low-income women are concentrated, including non-home care health care, food service, and retail.
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Understanding Africa’s Development Challenges
In this interview with C.J. Polychroniou, PERI researcher Lynda Pickbourn discusses her background growing up in Ghana as well as her research work on aid effectiveness and gender inequality, focusing on Ghana and Africa more generally. She emphasizes that “Africa is a continent of 55 countries, and the historical and institutional context of even neighboring countries can be quite different. Taking Africa seriously in economic analysis requires economists to understand the implications of these historical, cultural and institutional differences for theory and policy, and to take these differences into account in building the models that are so central to our analysis and policy prescriptions.”
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