Tag: The Economist

Opioid deaths in America reached new highs in the pandemic

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/30/opioid-deaths-in-america-reached-new-highs-in-the-pandemic

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LAST YEAR was a woeful time for people suffering from a drug addiction. Government shutdowns brought job losses and social isolation—conditions that make a transportive high all the more enticing. Those who had previously used drugs with others did so alone; if they overdosed, no one was around to call for help or administer naloxone, a medication that reverses opioid overdoses.

Fatal overdoses were marching upwards before the pandemic. But they leapt in the first part of last year as states locked down, according to provisional data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths from synthetic opioids—the biggest killer—were up by 52% year-on-year in the 12 months to August, the last month for which data are available. Those drugs killed nearly 52,000 Americans during the period; cocaine and heroin killed about 16,000 and 14,000, respectively (see chart). Once fatalities are fully tallied for 2020, in a few months’ time, it is likely to be the deadliest year yet in America’s opioid epidemic.

Publication Date: 30 March 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

Industrial production and investment surge in China

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/16/industrial-production-and-investment-surge-in-china

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ON MARCH 5TH at its annual parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s government revealed an economic-growth target of “more than 6%” for this year, a bar it is expected to clear with ease. Take the latest data. China’s key economic indicators for January and February, published on Monday, were buoyant. Industrial production and retail sales, for example, are soaring—35.1% and 33.8% higher than a year ago, respectively, beating consensus forecasts. Fixed-asset investment surged by 35% year on year, but still fell below expectations.

This year’s rocket-fuelled figures are even harder to decipher than usual because they are compared with record lows last year, during the first wave of covid-19 outbreaks. Macquarie, a bank, says that if you remove the effect of the pandemic, underlying retail sales were up by 3.1% for the first two months of 2021. This implies consumption accelerated after a few small outbreaks were brought under control in Beijing in January. Oxford Economics, a research group, says it expects household consumption to become the main engine of economic growth from the second quarter of 2021, as travel restrictions are eased. But in the first quarter, growth will remain sluggish.

Publication Date: 16 March 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

The world is far from hitting its target for carbon emissions

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/05/the-world-is-far-from-hitting-its-target-for-carbon-emissions

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LAST YEAR’S clear spring skies foreshadowed it and the numbers bear it out: covid-19 lockdowns caused a sharp drop in emissions from burning fossil fuels, the largest such drop since the second world war. The latest data, published on March 3rd by the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of climate researchers, puts industrial carbon-dioxide emissions produced in 2020 at 34bn tonnes, 2.6bn tonnes (7%) lower than in 2019.

Clearly, 2020 was an unusual year and emissions have already started to rebound. What is more, the drop came at a huge cost to economies and societies. Yet, in order to meet the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to between 1.5°C and 2°C above pre-industrial levels, more big cuts will be needed for the rest of the decade. “We need a cut in emissions of about the size of the fall [from the pandemic] every two years, but by completely different methods,” said Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia, one of the lead researchers on the study.

Publication Date: 5 March 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

Is the lot of female executives improving?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/04/is-the-lot-of-female-executives-improving

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WALL STREET’S glass ceiling cracked at last on March 1st, as Jane Fraser took charge of Citigroup, becoming the first woman to head a big American bank. That cracking sound has also been echoing across the rest of America Inc. Last year Carol Tomé became boss of UPS, a package-delivery giant. In January Rosalind Brewer became only the third black woman ever to run a Fortune 500 company (Walgreens Boots Alliance, a pharmacy chain). A month later Thasunda Brown Duckett was picked to run TIAA, a big pension fund.

Yet despite progress for women in the workplace, America still has a long way to go according to The Economist’s latest glass-ceiling index, which ranks conditions for working women across 29 countries. As usual, Nordic countries performed best overall in our ranking, with Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Norway taking the top four spots. At the bottom is South Korea, which scored just 25 out of 100 on our index, less than half the average for the OECD club of industrialised countries.

Publication Date: 4 March 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

How covid-19 triggered America’s first female recession in 50 years

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/08/how-covid-19-triggered-americas-first-female-recession-in-50-years

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RECESSIONS TYPICALLY hit men harder than women, not least because they tend to disproportionately affect male-dominated industries, such as construction and manufacturing. In the recession of 2008-09, for example, men accounted for some three-quarters of American job losses. The most recent downturn, by contrast, has weighed on female-dominated sectors, such as retail and hospitality. Last year the share of women on American payrolls fell from 50% in March 2020 to 49.1% two months later, before inching back up to 49.8% today.

A recent paper by three economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggests that some of the disparity can be explained by differences in parental responsibilities. Using monthly data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, the researchers analysed the labour-market outcomes of four groups of prime-age workers (those aged from 25 to 54): mothers; fathers; women without children; and men without children. They found that women suffered more than men in the wake of the pandemic but mothers fared worst of all. Between February and December the employment rate of mums dropped by 7% and their labour-force participation rate fell by 4%. Fathers, by comparison, suffered the least among the four groups—even less than childless men. Their employment and labour-force participation rates fell by 4% and 1%, respectively. Another recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that that the effect was biggest for mothers with children under five.

Publication Date: 8 March 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

Remote workers spend more on housing than those who commute

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/02/remote-workers-spend-more-on-housing-than-those-who-commute

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This shift will be a welcome change for many employees, especially those who used to have long, arduous commutes. But those who go remote on a full-time basis will incur at least one cost: paying for extra workspace at home. Such expenses are not trivial. A recent working paper by Christopher Stanton and Pratyush Tiwari of Harvard University estimates that, between 2013 and 2017, American renters who worked from home spent roughly 7% more of their incomes on housing than similar workers who commuted to the office. Homeowners who worked remotely spent an extra 9% on their mortgage payments and property taxes.

Publication Date: 2 March 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

The Economist’s tracker for covid-19 excess deaths

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker

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This repository contains the data behind The Economist’s tracker for covid-19 excess deaths and the code that we have used to clean, analyse and present the numbers.

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Our tracker uses data from a number of statistical bureaus, government departments and academic projects. For many of the countries, we have imported total_deaths from the Human Mortality Database, which collates detailed weekly breakdowns from official sources around the world. For other countries, you can find a full list of sources and links in a file called list_of_sources.csv, as well as spreadsheets in the /source-data/ folder.

For most countries, we have imported national figures on official covid deaths from a time series maintained by Johns Hopkins University and Our World In Data. For some countries, we have provided a regional breakdown of mortality. In these cases, we have imported regional covid_deaths from a variety of sources, including a Latin American time series maintained by Data Science Research Peru.

Date accessed: 25 February 2021

Publication Site: github

The march of the coronavirus across America

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/tracking-coronavirus-across-america

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However, herd immunity will take months to achieve, and the sheer scale of infections in America dictates that covid-19 will not be under control for some time. In order to see where the pandemic is currently most severe across the nation, we have created an interactive map of covid-19 cases and deaths. It divides America into 500 areas. For each of these it shows cases and deaths per 100,000 people, so that infection and death rates in, say, New York City and its surrounds (population 40m) can be compared with those in Ironwood, Michigan (population 27,000).

Publication Date: 23 February 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

Tracking covid-19 excess deaths across countries

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker

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As covid-19 has spread around the world, people have become grimly familiar with the death tolls that their governments publish each day. Unfortunately, the total number of fatalities caused by the pandemic may be even higher, for several reasons. First, the official statistics in many countries exclude victims who did not test positive for coronavirus before dying—which can be a substantial majority in places with little capacity for testing. Second, hospitals and civil registries may not process death certificates for several days, or even weeks, which creates lags in the data. And third, the pandemic has made it harder for doctors to treat other conditions and discouraged people from going to hospital, which may have indirectly caused an increase in fatalities from diseases other than covid-19.

One way to account for these methodological problems is to use a simpler measure, known as “excess deaths”: take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years. We have used statistical models to create our baselines, by predicting the number of deaths each region would normally have recorded in 2020.

Date Accessed: 25 February 2021

Date last updated: 23 February 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

Evidence from Britain shows covid-19 vaccines are very effective

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/02/22/evidence-from-britain-shows-covid-19-vaccines-are-very-effective

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THE SECOND wave of the pandemic has been devastating in much of the world. Since September 1st covid-19 has claimed the lives of 1.6m people, compared with 850,000 in the preceding nine months. In America alone, the death toll passed 500,000 on February 22nd. What is more, new variants that may be more transmissible, more deadly or better at evading the body’s immune response are spreading.

At last, some optimism is budding. More than 200m doses of covid-19 vaccine have been administered across 92 countries. After a slow start, America’s programme is gathering speed: 16% of adults have received a first shot, and President Joe Biden is on target to meet his goal of 150m doses by his 100th day in office. The number of infections in the country is falling by half every 14 days.

Publication Date: 21 February 2021

Publication Site: The Economist