Economic Crisis Unleashes Deep Recession in Austria – Stabilization Expected at Year-End
According to the June 2009 economic outlook of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB), the Austrian economy is projected to enter a deep recession in 2009 owing to the global slump in growth, with real GDP set to shrink by 4.2%. After further declining by a modest 0.4% in 2010, positive real annual GDP growth of 1.2% will reemerge only in 2011. Compared with the OeNB December 2008 economic outlook, growth expectations for 2009 and 2010 were downgraded by 3.9 and 1.2 percentage points respectively. This major revision reflects the steep slump in the demand for exports and investment – unparalleled in the post-war period. The current downturn is so pronounced that GDP levels seen in 2007 will not return until 2011. HICP inflation will ease from 3.2% in 2008 to a mere 0.4% in 2009 and rise modestly to 1.1% and 1.2% in 2010 and 2011 respectively.
The Austrian Labor Market and the Great Recession: Developments and Measures Taken
As the international financial and economic crisis unfolded, labor market conditions in Austria started to deteriorate in mid-2008, marking the onset of one of the severest crisis episodes in the Austrian labor market since World War II. Its effects have been surprisingly small, however, considering the scale of the decline in real economic activity. The reason for this moderate impact was that total hours worked declined more sharply than headcount employment. The working hour reductions were much more substantial than can be explained by short-time work alone, though. An international comparison shows country differences in the extent to which the decline in employment was based on reductions in headcount or hours worked per employee. Austria and Germany are among those countries in which hours worked declined most sharply, which made it possible to keep more people in employment. Even though labor market conditions in Austria have been improving over the past few months, unemployment figures and the number of participants in training programs by the Austrian Public Employment Service are still higher than they were before the crisis. Employment figures, too, have not yet returned to precrisis levels..
Deliberative Democracy and the Resource Curse: A Nationwide Experiment in Tanzania
Oil and gas discoveries in developing countries are often associated with short-sighted economic policies and, in response, calls to insulate resource management from populist impulses. We report on a randomized experiment testing methods to overcome this apparent tension between sound resource governance and democratic politics. Soon after Tanzania’s discovery of major natural gas reserves, we invited a nationally representative sample of voters to an intensive public deliberation of policy options featuring nationally recognized experts and small-group discussions. Democratic deliberation reinforced the public’s strong preference for rapid spending of gas revenues, but also increased support for various prudential and economically orthodox measures, including independent oversight of gas revenues, limits on government borrowing, and selling gas abroad rather than subsidizing fuel at home. These effects were driven by deliberation per se, rather than a pure information treatment, and show no evidence of contamination by facilitatoror peer-effects in group deliberations. www.cgdev.org Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall, James Fishkin, and Mujobu Moyo