Book Launch Event, "On the Trail of Capital Flight from Africa: The Takers and the Enablers" by Leonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce will take place on March 25th, at 3:00pm ET in the Gordon Hall conference room. The launch seminar will be chaired by Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of PERI, Robert Pollin and it will be hybrid – face to face with remote connection on zoom. On the Trail of Capital Flight from Africa investigates the dynamics of capital flight from Angola, Côte d'Ivoire, and South Africa, countries that have witnessed large-scale illicit financial outflows in recent decades. Quantitative, qualitative, and institutional analysis for each country is used to examine the modus operandi of capital flight; that is, the 'who', 'how', and 'where' dimensions of the phenomenon. 'Who' refers to major domestic and foreign players; 'how' refers to mechanisms of capital acquisition, transfer, and concealment; and 'where' refers to the destinations of capital flight and the transactions involved. The Zoom link will be posted a few days before the event.
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has been awarded a $80,000 grant by the Groundwork Collaborative to investigate the connections between public spending and economic insecurity among US households. The project—undertaken by Levy Institute scholars Luiza Nassif-Pires, Ajit Zacharias, Thomas Masterson, and Fernando Rios-Avila, and in consultation with Katherine Moos, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst—will focus on the distributional effects of public spending from an intersectional perspective: breaking down the impacts on economic well-being with respect to age, race, gender, education, and class. 
Amanda Desmond, a junior economics and space science major in the University of Massachusetts Commonwealth Honors College, has been named one of 51 Brooke Owens Fellows for 2022. Desmond, a native of Beverly, Mass., is the first student selected for the program from the University of Massachusetts system. During the summer of 2022, she will spend 12 weeks with Voyager Space Holdings in Denver working directly with the firm’s CEO, Dylan Taylor. The Brooke Owens Fellowship is a New York-based nonprofit program that recognizes exceptional undergraduate women and other gender minorities with space and aviation internships, senior mentorship, and a lifelong professional network. The fellowship was founded in 2016 to honor the memory of beloved industry pioneer and accomplished pilot D. Brooke Owens, who died from cancer that June at age 35. 
Professor Michael Ash of the UMass Amherst School of Public Policy and Department of Economics is part of an interdisciplinary team from UMass and Tufts University researching social justice in federal flood mitigation funding. The team of faculty members and undergraduate researchers, led by UMass finance professor Mila Getmansky Sherman and Tufts civil and environmental engineering professor Deborah Sunter, reported their research in December at the fall online meeting of the American Geophysical Union. 
Ina Ganguli, Associate Professor of Economics and Associate Director of the UMass Computational Social Science Institute has been appointed to the board of CSWEP (Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession). A standing committee of the American Economic Association since 1971, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) serves professional women economists by monitoring their progress and promoting their careers. 
Umass Professor Emeritus James Boyce paper "
Katherine A. Moos received the Helen Potter Award for her paper “The Historical Evolution of the Cost of Social Reproduction in the United States, 1959-2012.” Each year the Association for Social Economics (ASE) awards the Helen Potter Award for the best article in the Review of Social Economy by a promising scholar of social economics. In her paper, Moos uses data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA)—including a BEA satellite account that imputes monetary values for unwaged household production—to propose a feminist, class-based framework for estimating the annual cost of social reproduction in the United States from 1959 to 2012. The key finding is that the cost of socially reproducing the US working class has risen relative to the cost of employing the US working class, implying that employers are paying for a decreasing proportion of the total societal cost of social reproduction. These results are discussed in relationship to growing income inequality and the contradictory role of the US state in the neoliberal era.
According to a survey on free trade from the University of Chicago, economists overwhelmingly agree that the net effects of free trade are good. A recent article by several IMF economists affirms that, “perhaps more than on any other issue, there is agreement among economists that international trade should be free.” Free trade is said to enhance efficiency in all participating countries, which can lead to higher productivity and higher rates of economic growth. These higher growth rates can, in turn, raise living standards and therefore represent a desirable policy target—particularly for developing countries.
For once, most of the debtors are not in Africa, but in the North. I am not talking money, but about climate debt, as natural disasters are multiplying and the fight against climate change has become an existential issue. Since industrialized countries have used the available atmospheric space to develop and get rich by exploiting fossil fuels, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) — that is coming to end in Glasgow right now — must be an opportunity to recognize this climate debt to Africa, and to developing countries in general, and to honor it. 
Feminist economists have long argued that the purpose of an economy is to support the survival and flourishing of life, in all its forms. This may seem obvious but it turns on its head the prevailing view, which implicitly assumes the opposite causation: the economy runs according to its own laws, which must be respected by mere human actors. In this market-fundamentalist perspective, it is a potential angry god which can deliver prosperity or devastation and must be placated through all sorts of measures—including sacrifices made in its name. 