Have Abortion Bans Affected Reproductive and Infant Health?
The overturning of Roe v. Wade led to a wave of abortion bans in state legislatures across the United States. Raymond Caraher uses Texas’s 2021 six-week ban on abortion to examine the causal effect of an abortion ban on reproductive health outcomes. Among his findings are that the ban led to increases in the probability of an infant being born with very low birth weight and significant increases in the infant mortality rate, with Black non-Hispanic infants experiencing the largest increases in these negative health impacts.
External Debt Stress and Domestic Debt Restructuring: Resolving a Paradox
The ongoing sovereign debt crisis in low- and middle-income countries is primarily characterized by governments’ inability to meet their external debt obligations denominated in hard currencies. PERI researcher CP Chandrasekar describes how, despite this, the IMF and major private financial institutions have insisted on imposing measures to restructure governments’ domestic debt commitments issued largely in domestic currencies. Chandrasekar explains why the IMF and global finance insist on domestic debt restructuring as opposed to focusing on the actual primary sources of these government’s debt crises—foreign debts in hard currencies.
Confronting the Global South Debt Crisis
PERI researcher Ilene Grabel documents that a severe debt crisis is emerging in the Global South. She argues that the burdens of this emerging crisis will be borne disproportionately by women and other vulnerable groups and nations. Within this context, Grabel explores opportunities for expanding and creating the fiscal space that national policymakers can use to counteract the crisis and prevent the onset of austerity conditions, and thereby, specifically, protect the well-being of women and girls. Grabel’s proposals also aim to advance, more generally, viable green transitions and a more just, inclusive global economy.
Inequality and the Environment
This lecture by PERI researcher James Boyce, delivered at the ceremony for the inaugural Global Inequality Research Award at Sciences Po in Paris, provides a trajectory of Boyce’s work on inequality and the environment that was recognized by the award. Thirty years ago, many economists and environmentalists saw inequality as a non-issue. Today there is widespread recognition of its importance. Boyce reviews how inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power affect both the magnitude and incidence of environmental harms and discusses some of the synergies between policies to reduce inequality and to improve environmental quality.
