Shocking paper about the industry that handles over 80% of global goods trade: the maritime shipping industry: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… by Guillaume Vuillemey
The paper documents what happens to "end-of-life ships"...
thread 1/
"almost all ships globally are dismantled in poor environmental conditions after being “beached” on the shores of Bangladesh, India or Pakistan"
Moreover, "a fast-growing number of shipping companies use “last-voyage flags”...
2/
... most likely in an attempt to hide such dirty practices: ships are sold to a third party just for the last voyage to a beaching yard.
In doing so, shipping companies get paid for the value of a ship’s raw materials ...
3/
...but do not assume any of the responsibilities associated with toxic wastes or oil residuals (which end up at sea).
While last-voyage flags were close to non-existent in the early 2000s, they represented 55.2% of all end-of-life ships globally in 2019"
4/
"the six most-popular last-voyage flags are primarily flags that did not exist in the early 2000.
The most striking example is the one of Palau, an island with a population below 20,000 inhabitants and a capital city below 300 inhabitants...
5/
... Its ship registry represents less than 0.001% of the world fleet, but 59.5% of last-voyage flags in 2019.
In other terms, it is likely that this registry has been created specifically with the purpose of allowing shipping companies to evade end-of-life responsibilities"
6/
The paper points to a dark side of globalization:
"the drop in transportation costs [that facilitated globalization] was partly achieved via the evasion of shipowners’ responsibilities, including environmental liabilities"
As a result, "globalization may have gone “too far“
People do not trust economists, we hear that all the time.
For instance, Esther Duflo recently argued that “economists have lost most of their credibility” citing YouGov data from 🇬🇧 media.eur.nl/Mediasite/Play…
However, slightly newer data give rise to some optimism!
Thread (1/n)
The newer data are also from YouGov in the UK, collected in April 2017, and commissioned by @economics_net and @ing_economics.
New great paper by Janet Currie, Henrik Kleven, and Esmee Zwiers @ZwiersEsmee documents methodological changes in applied microeconomics in the last 4 decades: aeaweb.org/conference/202…
Thread with some great graphs 👇 (1/n)
Applied Microeconomics has become very dominant in the Top 5 journals:
75% of papers in the Top 5 can be classified as applied microeconomics nowadays
(2/n)
The Credibility Revolution is clearly visible in the data
Likewise in Spain — and especially in Catalonia — female migrants wearing headscarves receive substantially fewer positive call-backs compared to equally qualified majority applicants: