These numbers are from the International Monetary Fund. But Robert Scott, a trade expert with the Economic Policy Institute, told The Week that they’ve been looking at unpublished data from the World Trade Organization that suggests China’s total goods trade surplus with the rest of the world was around $1 trillion in 2014, and could be even higher for 2015. With a gross domestic product (GDP) of $10.35 trillion in 2014, that would put China’s goods trade surplus just below a whopping 10 percent of its economy.
The Week
January 20, 2016
As Republicans claim that the legislation would boost the state’s struggling economy, the research they are using to back up that assertion is coming under scrutiny. The labor-allied Economic Policy Institute is contesting the integrity of a report from researchers associated with the West Virginia University School of Business, who claimed that there is a causal relationship between right-to-work laws and a state’s employment growth rates. EPI says the report relies on flawed data and analysis and doesn’t follow best practices of similar studies in the past.
The American Prospect
January 20, 2016
Wealth inequality is far greater. According to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans control 35.6 percent of the total wealth of the country—more than a third.
How Stuff Works
January 20, 2016
The Huffington Post
January 19, 2016
The wages of middle-wage workers were either flat or in decline from the 1980s through the 2000s (except for a bump in the late ’90s), and wages for low-wage workers fell 5 percent from 1979 to 2013, according to an analysis from the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Christian Science Monitor
January 19, 2016
Wage hikes that became law prior to the present-day Fight for $15 era were more incremental and a matter of legislative “horse trading,” says David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. But because the value of the federal minimum wage has eroded so much—it’s been $7.25 since 2009— recent efforts to increase minimum wages at the local, state, and federal levels have focused more on what a worker needs to earn to live comfortably in a certain geographic area. That—along with the attention given to the United States’ vast income inequality—has made the cost of living a more prominent talking point in legislative negotiations and among worker advocates, Cooper says.
Fortune
January 19, 2016
Since 2009, salaries for CEOs at a number of U.S. firms have increased by 54.3 percent while ordinary wages have plateaued, according to the report. CEOs earn more than 10 times the amount they did 30 years ago, according to a report released last June from the Economic Policy Institute.
Newsweek
January 19, 2016
But one can’t help but wonder, if the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s pilot program has a hard time getting started in the city doing that much to end segregation, how will it work nationally? “Baltimore is actually trying to do something about segregation, which is more than a lot of places,” Richard Rothstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute who has written extensively about segregation told VICE. “But there’s still resistance. There’s always resistance.”
Vice News
January 19, 2016
Black unemployment in South Carolina is 11.8 percent, compared to 4.6 percent among whites, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And while 2012 Census figures show the per capita income for whites in Charleston was $37,193, it was $15,168 for blacks.
MSNBC
January 19, 2016
It means China sold $342.6 billion more worth of goods and services to America than America sold to China. That, in turn, means demand generated by Americans isn’t producing jobs in America, but in China instead: Back in 2013, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimated that we’ve lost 2.8 million jobs to China since 2001, mainly in manufacturing. This imbalance falls especially hard on the working class, since the jobs that are lost are overwhelmingly held by lower-income Americans. Where Trump goes awry is in recommending tariffs as a solution. As Robert Scott, EPI’s expert on the economics of international trade, explained to me, the basic problem is currency manipulation.
The Week
January 19, 2016