Cities/Regions

Alarming rates of forest loss in the Colombian Amazon have created a perceived trade-off that the only means of achieving economic prosperity is by sacrificing the forest. This study finds little evidence of this trade-off; rather, we find that economic development and forest protection are not an either-or choice. Forest clearing is driven by extensive cattle-ranching as a means to secure land titles. In essence, the loss of some of the world’s richest biodiversity is the result of some of the least economically complex activities that fail to achieve economic prosperity in the region. If anything, the acceleration in deforestation has accompanied a period of economic stagnation.

The existing economic model in the Amazon – centered on agrarian colonization and mineral extraction – has not generated prosperity for the people, all while failing the forest. The exceptional diversity of the Amazon’s biome is not reflected in the region’s economy. The Amazonian economy is best characterized by its low diversity and low complexity. A significant proportion of employment is linked to public administration – more than in other departments of the country. Very little of the production in the departments is destined to be consumed outside the departments ("exported").

This study seeks to define an alternative economic model for the Colombian Amazon from the perspective of economic complexity with environmental sustainability. Economic complexity research finds that the productive potential of places depends not only on the soil or natural resources, but on the productive capabilities—or knowhow—held by its people. This research finds that the Colombian Amazon will not become rich by adding value to its raw materials or by specializing in one economic activity. Rather, economic development is best described as a process of expanding the set of capabilities present to be able to produce a more diverse set of goods, of increasingly greater complexity. This model starts from the base of understanding the existing productive capabilities in Caquetá, Guaviare, and Putumayo, to identify high-potential economic sectors that build off those capabilities to achieve new, sustainable pathways to shared prosperity.

Achieving shared prosperity in the Amazon depends on the connectivity and opportunity in its urban areas. The primary drivers of greater economic complexity – and prosperity – are the cities in the Amazon. Even in the remote areas of the Amazon, the majority of people in Caquetá, Guaviare, and Putumayo live in urban areas. The low prosperity in the Colombian Amazon is driven by the lack of prosperous cities. The report finds that Amazonian cities are affected by the lack of connectivity to major Colombian cities that limit their ability to ‘export’ things outside the department to then expand the capacity to ‘import’ the things that are not produced locally as a means to improve well-being.

Executive Summary

Quantitative evidence supports the contention that Wyoming’s housing market is constrained, to a greater degree than many other parts of the US. Prices are persistently above expectations given economic fundamentals in most parts of the state, and the supply of new housing in Wyoming is on average less responsive to price increases than in other US counties. This has undermined natural population growth and contributed to a low amount of population density close to city centers in Wyoming, as compared to other US cities with comparable population levels. Importantly, this phenomenon is not simply the result of pandemic-era economic frictions. The evidence shows that these constraints have durably persisted in Wyoming. 

This housing constraint weighs heavily on the broader Wyoming’s economy, and chokes off growth in new industries that could add to the Wyoming economy beyond its natural resource base. Businesses consistently report a lack of access to workforce as a leading problem that ultimately results from a lack of housing. Some businesses have even tried to create their own housing for employees, and news reports abound of teachers and nurses who secure jobs in Wyoming communities but then have to leave because they cannot find housing.

Key problems behind Wyoming’s housing constraints include excessive regulations concerning housing density and insufficient investment in arterial infrastructure. For example, there is evidence that over-regulated minimum lot sizes in Wyoming are blocking the creation of supply to match free-market demand for houses with smaller amounts of land. Other areas of over-regulation include those concerning allowable housing types, building height, parking spaces per dwelling, and the housing approval process itself. This may be seen as surprising given Wyoming’s reputation as a low-regulation state, but Wyoming maintains restrictions that other states and countries have discarded as outdated and highly counterproductive. Besides outright restrictions on housing development, we find that the most common cost driver undermining the housing development has to do with low public investment in needed arterial infrastructure, especially water systems. Land supply as well as material and construction costs are not primary constraints to housing development across the state, but may matter for select communities.

We suggest a portfolio of policy changes for the state of Wyoming to explore in order to solve its housing constraints. One category of changes is regulatory, and focuses on deregulation, reducing bureaucratic overhead, and shifting from veto-cratic to democratic housing approval procedures. Another category is focused on investment on infrastructure to support housing, and exploration of state-local funding structures to facilitate continuous infrastructure improvement. If implemented, these changes will not only help to solve Wyoming’s housing constraints but also facilitate housing development in a way that combats urban sprawl, and in doing so protects open spaces outside of cities that Wyomingites value.

A menudo se piensa que alcanzar la prosperidad económica en la selva amazónica es incompatible con la protección del ambiente. Los investigadores ambientales suelen advertir, con razón, que la velocidad de la deforestación actual está llevando a la Amazonía a un potencial punto de quiebre a partir del cual la selva no podrá dejar de deteriorarse hasta convertirse en una sábana herbácea. Pero se habla menos de lo que hay que hacer para generar prosperidad compartida en las comunidades amazónicas. La deforestación suele tratarse como algo inevitable a la hora de atender las necesidades humanas, locales y globales. Este reporte sintetiza los hallazgos de dos proyectos del Laboratorio de Crecimiento de Harvard University, que estudian la naturaleza del crecimiento económico en dos contextos amazónicos: el departamento de Loreto, en Perú, y los departamentos de Caquetá, Guaviare y Putumayo, en Colombia. La meta de estas colaboraciones es valerse de la investigación de alcance global que ha hecho el Growth Lab sobre la naturaleza del crecimiento económico para aplicar esos métodos al reto único de desarrollar rutas hacia la prosperidad en la Amazonía, de manera que no se perjudique a la selva. Este reporte compara y contrasta los hallazgos en la Amazonía peruana y colombiana para evaluar hasta qué punto hay lecciones que se puedan generalizar sobre la relación entre crecimiento económico y protección del bosque en la Amazonía. 

Las alarmantes tasas de pérdida de bosques en la Amazonia colombiana han creado la percepción de que el único medio para lograr la prosperidad económica es sacrificar el bosque. Este estudio encuentra poca evidencia de esta percepción; más bien, encontramos que el desarrollo económico y la protección de los bosques no son una opción entre uno u otro. La tala de bosques está impulsada por la ganadería extensiva como medio para asegurar títulos de propiedad de la tierra. En esencia, la pérdida de una de las biodiversidades más ricas del mundo es el resultado de algunas de las actividades económicamente menos complejas que no permiten lograr la prosperidad económica en la región. En todo caso, la aceleración de la deforestación ha ido acompañada de un período de estancamiento económico.

El modelo económico existente en la Amazonía—centrado en la colonización agraria y la extracción de minerales—no ha generado prosperidad para la gente y le ha fallado al bosque. La excepcional diversidad del bioma amazónico no se refleja en la economía de la región. La economía amazónica se caracteriza mejor por su baja diversidad y complejidad. Una proporción significativa del empleo está vinculada a la administración pública, más que en otros departamentos del país. Muy poca de la producción de los departamentos se destina a ser consumida fuera de los departamentos ("exportada").

Este estudio busca definir un modelo económico alternativo para la Amazonía colombiana desde la perspectiva de la complejidad económica con la sostenibilidad ambiental. La investigación sobre la complejidad económica encuentra que el potencial productivo de los lugares depende no sólo del suelo o los recursos naturales, sino también de las capacidades productivas (o conocimientos técnicos) de su gente. Esta investigación encuentra que la Amazonía colombiana no se enriquecerá agregando valor a sus materias primas o especializándose en una sola actividad económica. Más bien, el desarrollo económico se describe mejor como un proceso de expansión del conjunto de capacidades presentes para poder producir un conjunto cada vez más diverso y complejo. Este modelo parte de la base de comprender las capacidades productivas existentes en Caquetá, Guaviare y Putumayo, para identificar sectores económicos de alto potencial que aprovechen esas capacidades para lograr caminos nuevos y sostenibles hacia la prosperidad compartida.

Lograr una prosperidad compartida en la Amazonía depende de la conectividad y las oportunidades en sus áreas urbanas. Los principales impulsores de una mayor complejidad económica—y prosperidad— son las ciudades de la Amazonía. Incluso en las zonas remotas de la Amazonía, la mayoría de la población de Caquetá, Guaviare y Putumayo vive en zonas urbanas. La baja prosperidad en la Amazonía colombiana se debe a la falta de ciudades prósperas. El informe encuentra que las ciudades amazónicas se ven afectadas por la falta de conectividad con las principales ciudades colombianas que limitan su capacidad de 'exportar' cosas fuera del departamento para luego ampliar la capacidad de 'importar' las cosas que no se producen localmente como medio para mejorar el bienestar. 

¿Hay que sacrificar la selva para traer prosperidad económica a la Amazonía colombiana? Según este compendio de investigación compuesto por una serie de estudios sobre esa región, la respuesta es “no”: la percepción que hay un dilema entre crecimiento económico y protección de la selva es una falsa dicotomía. Los factores que impulsan la deforestación y la prosperidad son distinguibles entre sí, y tienen lugar en sitios diferentes. La deforestación ocurre en la frontera agropecuaria, donde uno de los entornos con mayor complejidad biológica del mundo está siendo destruido por algunas de las actividades económicas menos complejas, en particular la ganadería extensiva. En cambio, los motores económicos de la Amazonía son sus áreas urbanas, que en su mayoría están ubicadas lejos del borde de la selva, como es el caso de las áreas localizadas en el piedemonte y que no cuentan con un bosque denso. Estas ciudades ofrecen mayor complejidad económica con su acceso a un rango más amplio de capacidades productivas en actividades de mayores ingresos, con poca presencia de las actividades que favorecen la deforestación. Tal vez la cara menos notoria de la vida en cada una de las tres regiones amazónicas estudiadas, Caquetá, Guaviare y Putumayo, es que la mayoría de la gente vive en áreas urbanas. Este hecho dice mucho sobre la geografía económica de esos lugares: incluso en las partes más remotas de la Amazonía, la gente quiere vivir cerca de los demás, en áreas densamente pobladas. Esto además corrobora los hallazgos de nuestra investigación global en las últimas dos décadas: para traer prosperidad hay que expandir las capacidades productivas disponibles a nivel local y así diversificar la producción de ese lugar hacia más actividades y que posean mayor complejidad.  

Does economic prosperity in the Colombian Amazon require sacrificing the forest? This research compendium of a series of studies on the Colombian Amazon finds the answer to this question is no: the perceived trade-off between economic growth and forest protection is a false dichotomy. The drivers of deforestation and prosperity are distinct – as they happen in different places. Deforestation occurs at the agricultural frontier, in destroying some of the world’s most complex biodiversity by some of the least economically complex activities, particularly cattle-ranching. By contrast, the economic drivers in the Amazon are its urban areas often located far from the forest edge, including in non-forested piedmont regions. These cities offer greater economic complexity by accessing a wider range of productive capabilities in higher-income activities with little presence of those activities driving deforestation. Perhaps the most underappreciated facet of life in each of the three Amazonian regions studied, Caquetá, Guaviare, and Putumayo, is that the majority of people live in urban areas. This is a telling fact of economic geography: that even in the remote parts of the Amazon, people want to come together to live in densely populated areas. This corroborates the findings of our global research over the past two decades that prosperity results from expanding the productive capabilities available locally to diversify production to do more, and more complex, activities.

Achieving economic prosperity in the Amazon rainforest is often seen as incompatible with protecting the forest. Environmental researchers rightly warn that rapid deforestation is pushing the Amazon close to a potential tipping point of forest dieback into grassy savanna. Less has been said about what is required to generate shared prosperity in Amazonian communities. Deforestation is often treated as inevitable to serve human needs, local and global. This report synthesizes the findings of two engagements by the Growth Lab at Harvard University that study the nature of economic growth in two Amazonian contexts: Loreto in Peru, and Caquetá, Guaviare, and Putumayo, in Colombia. The aim of these engagements is to leverage the Growth Lab's global research into the nature of economic growth to apply those methods to the unique challenge of developing paths to prosperity in the Amazon in ways that do not harm the forest. This report compares and contrasts the findings from the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon to assess the extent to which there are generalizable lessons on the relationship between economic growth and forest protection in the Amazon.

A growing body of research documents that the size and growth of an industry in a place depends on how much related activity is found there. This fact is commonly referred to as the "principle of relatedness." However, there is no consensus on why we observe the principle of relatedness, how best to determine which industries are related or how this empirical regularity can help inform local industrial policy. We perform a structured search over tens of thousands of specifications to identify robust – in terms of out-of-sample predictions – ways to determine how well industries fit the local economies of US cities. To do so, we use data that allow us to derive relatedness from observing which industries co-occur in the portfolios of establishments, firms, cities and countries. Different portfolios yield different relatedness matrices, each of which help predict the size and growth of local industries. However, our specification search not only identifes ways to improve the performance of such predictions, but also reveals new facts about the principle of relatedness and important trade-offs between predictive performance and interpretability of relatedness patterns. We use these insights to deepen our theoretical understanding of what underlies path-dependent development in cities and expand existing policy frameworks that rely on inter-industry relatedness analysis.

This report analyzes the economic legacy of spatial exclusion in South Africa, focusing on the long-term effects of the former Bantustan policy. Through quantitative analysis, the report explores the spatial dimension of economic activity in South Africa and specifically how this particular spatial institution has continued to shape current economic outcomes, despite past and present attempts to reverse the effect. The report also identifies areas for further research and potential intervention to enable more effective economic inclusion of the former homeland areas of the country.

Related project: Accelerating Growth Through Inclusion in South Africa

Estimating the capabilities, or inputs of production, that drive and constrain the economic development of urban areas has remained a challenging goal. We posit that capabilities are instantiated in the complexity and sophistication of urban activities, the know-how of individual workers, and the city-wide collective know-how. We derive a model that indicates how the value of these three quantities can be inferred from the probability that an individual in a city is employed in a given urban activity. We illustrate how to estimate empirically these variables using data on employment across industries and metropolitan statistical areas in the USA. We then show how the functional form of the probability function derived from our theory is statistically superior when compared with competing alternative models, and that it explains well-known results in the urban scaling and economic complexity literature. Finally, we show how the quantities are associated with metrics of economic performance, suggesting our theory can provide testable implications for why some cities are more prosperous than others.

Loreto es un lugar de contrastes. Es el departamento más grande del Perú, pero se encuentra entre los de menor densidad poblacional. Su capital, Iquitos, está más cerca de los estados fronterizos de Brasil y Colombia que de las capitales de sus regiones vecinas en el Perú - San Martín y Ucayali. Sólo se puede llegar a Iquitos por vía aérea o fluvial, lo que la convierte en una de las mayores ciudades del mundo sin acceso por carretera. Desde la fundación del departamento, la economía de Loreto ha dependido de la explotación de recursos naturales, desde el boom del caucho a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX hasta la extracción petrolera y explotación de recursos forestales que predomina en nuestros días. Este modelo ha traído consigo daños ambientales significativos y ha producido un patrón de crecimiento lento y volátil, que ha abierto una brecha cada vez más amplia entre la economía de la región y la del resto del país. Entre 1980 y 2018, Loreto creció a una tasa promedio compuesta anual cuatro veces menor a la del resto del Perú. Es decir, mientras el resto del Perú triplicó el tamaño de su economía, la de Loreto creció algo menos que un tercio.

En la última década (2008-2018), la región también se ha venido distanciando de sus pares amazónicos en el país (Ucayali, San Martín y Madre de Dios), que han crecido a una tasa promedio anual cinco veces mayor. En este período, el ingreso promedio por habitante en Loreto ha pasado de ser tres cuartas partes del promedio nacional en 2008 a menos de la mitad para 2018. Además del rezago económico - o quizás como consecuencia de él -, Loreto también se ubica entre los departamentos con peores indicadores de desarrollo social, anemia y desnutrición infantil del Perú.

En este contexto, el Laboratorio de Crecimiento de la Universidad de Harvard se asoció con la Fundación Gordon and Betty Moore para desarrollar una investigación que proporcionara insumos y recomendaciones de política para acelerar el desarrollo de la región y generar prosperidad de forma sostenible.

Ethiopia will need to increase the diversity of its export basket to guarantee a sustainable growth path. Ethiopia has shown stellar growth performance throughout the last two decades, but, in this period, export growth has been insufficient to finance the country’s balance of payments needs. As argued in our Growth Diagnostic report,1 Ethiopia’s growth decelerated as a result of the increasing external imbalances which have resulted in a foreign exchange constraint. This macroeconomic imbalance is now slowing the rate of economic growth, job creation and poverty alleviation across the country. Although export growth will not be rapid enough to address the foreign exchange constraint on its own in the short-term, the only way for the country to achieve macroeconomic balance as it grows in the longer term is to increase its exports per capita. With only limited opportunities to expand its exports on the intensive margin, the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) will have to strategically support the diversification of its economy to expand its exports base.

This report applies the theory of Economic Complexity in order to describe the base of productive knowhow and assess the opportunities and constraints to diversification in Ethiopia’s economy. The theory of Economic Complexity offers tools to capture and quantitatively estimate the diversity and sophistication of productive knowhow in an economy and to analyze the potential to develop comparative advantage in new industries. These tools provide valuable inputs for informing diversification strategies and the use of state resources by providing rigorous information on the risks and potential returns of government industrial policies in support of different sectors.

We analyze Ukraine's opportunities to participate in European value chains, using traditional gravity models, combined with tools from Economic Complexity Analysis to study international trade (exports) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). This toolbox is shown to be predictive of the growth and entry of new exports to the EU's Single Market, as well as foreign direct investments from the Single Market in Ukraine. We find that Ukraine has suffered from a decline of trade with Russia, which has led not only to a quantitative but also a qualitative deterioration in Ukrainian exports. Connecting to western European value chains is in principle possible, with several opportunities in the automotive, information technology and other sectors. However, such a shift may lead to a spatial restructuring of the Ukrainian economy and a mismatch between the geographical supply of and demand for labor.

El Laboratorio de Crecimiento de la Universidad de Harvard, bajo el auspicio de la Fundación Gordon and Betty Moore, ha desarrollado esta investigación para identificar las capacidades productivas existentes en Loreto y las actividades económicas con potencial para liderar la transformación estructural de su economía. Este reporte forma parte de una investigación más amplia – Transformación estructural y restricciones limitantes a la prosperidad en Loreto, Perú – que busca aportar insumos para el desarrollo de políticas públicas a escala nacional y regional que contribuyan a promover el desarrollo productivo y la prosperidad de la región, tomando en cuenta sus características particulares.

What does it take for a sub-national unit to become an autonomous engine of growth? This issue is particularly relevant to large cities, as they tend to display larger and more complex know-how agglomerations and may have access to a broader set of policy tools. To approximate an answer to this question, specific to the case of Buenos Aires, Harvard’s Growth Lab engaged in a research project from December 2018 to June 2019, collaborating with the Center for Evidence-based Evaluation of Policies (CEPE) of Universidad Torcuato di Tella, and the Development Unit of the Secretary of Finance of the City of Buenos Aires. Together, we have developed research agenda that seeks to provide inputs for a policy plan aimed at decoupling Buenos Aires’s growth trajectory from the rest of Argentina’s.

Listen to the Growth Lab Podcast interview with the authors. 

By exploiting variation both in mortgage payoffs and mortgage interest rate resets, we find that a decline in mortgage payments induces a significant increase in nondurable goods spending, even when households have substantial amounts of liquidity. Following mortgage payoff, households increase consumption expenditures by 61% of the original payment. In comparison, households increase consumption by only 36% in response to a transitory payment adjustment induced by interest rate changes. Households with a higher payment-to-income ratio have a significantly lower marginal propensity to consume (MPC). These results have practical implications for policy markers seeking to design consumption boosting policies and are important for understanding how changes in monetary policy may affect consumer spending patterns.

We use aggregated and anonymized information based on international expenditures through corporate payment cards to map the network of global business travel. We combine this network with information on the industrial composition and export baskets of national economies. The business travel network helps to predict which economic activities will grow in a country, which new activities will develop and which old activities will be abandoned. In statistical terms, business travel has the most substantial impact among a range of bilateral relationships between countries, such as trade, foreign direct investments and migration. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this impact is causal: business travel from countries specializing in a specific industry causes growth in that economic activity in the destination country. Our interpretation of this is that business travel helps to diffuse knowledge, and we use our estimates to assess which countries contribute or benefit the most from the diffusion of knowledge through global business travel.

Additional content:

• Mapping Business Travel & Knowhow Index
• Podcast: What would happen if business travel stopped?
• Op-ed: Why Zoom can't save the world

Saudi Arabia is home to the world’s third largest migrant population. Under mounting pressure to increase the private sector employment of Saudis during the last decade, a series of nationalization policies on the labor force have been imposed since late 2011. In this paper, we study how the first nationalization policy, Nitaqat, affected the overall labor market and non-oil firms in the private sector, especially exporting firms. Our rich and novel data allow us to assess the effect of the policy on a wide set of outcomes: employment decisions by composition and size, the output and productivity of exporting firms, labor costs, and exit from the market. Using a difference-in-difference analysis, we compare the 2011 to 2012 change in outcomes between firms above and firms below the threshold required for the minimum share of Saudi workers in a firm. Our results suggest that the policy succeeded in encouraging firms to increase the share of Saudis in private firms. It also increased the share of Saudi women in the workforce, suggesting that the policy had a positive effect on increasing female labor force participation. However, these gains came at a very high cost to firms: our findings suggest that the policy led to a reduced firm size, reduced productivity and output of exporting firms, increased wage bill, increased share of low-skilled Saudi workers, and higher firm exit rates.

Considering the case of the proposed airport in Vlora, South Albania, this report analyzes the channels through which a new greenfield airport can contribute to regional economic development. In December 2019, the Government of Albania opened a call for offers to build a new airport in the south of the country. While there is evidence indicating that the airport could be commercially viable, this does not provide a grounded perspective on the channels by which the airport could boost the regional economy. To evaluate how the new airport would interact with existing and potential economic activities, this report evaluates three of the most important channels of impact by which the airport could serve as a promoter: (1) economic activities directly related to or promoted by airports, (2) the airport’s potential contribution to the region’s booming tourism sector and (3) the potential for the country’s development of air freight as a tool for export promotion. In each of these three cases, the report identifies complementary public goods or policies that could maximize the airport’s impact in the region.

The operation of the airport itself could stimulate a series of economic activities directly related to air traffic services. Airports have the ability to mold the economic structure of the places immediately around them, acting both as a consumer and as a supplier of air transport services. Not only activities related to transportation and logistics thrive around airports, but also a variety of manufacturing, trade and construction industries. Nevertheless, the agglomeration benefits of a successful aerotropolis are not guaranteed by the construction of an airport. For South Albania’s new airport to actualize its potential returns, integrated planning of the airport site will be required, with focus on real estate planification and provision of complementary infrastructure.

Establishing an airport in Vlora has the potential to spur regional development in South Albania through facilitating the growth of the tourism sector and its related activities. Albania’s tourism industry has seen strong growth in the last two decades, but still lags behind its potential. Albania only has a strong penetration in the tourism market of its neighboring markets, and the high seasonality of the tourism season further limits the sector’s growth. The establishment of an airport in South Albania would ease some of the tourism industry constraints tied to transportation into the country and region. Given the high reliance of the tourism industry on its many complementary inputs, more than one area of concern may have to be addressed for the impact of the new airport to be maximized. Facilitating transportation access around the South Albania region and specifically to tourist sites; preparing natural and cultural heritage sites for tourism use and expanding tourism infrastructure to accommodate potential growth are some of the interventions analyzed.

Airfreight infrastructure could in theory provide opportunities to improve the competitiveness of Albanian exports but developing a successful air cargo cluster is no simple task. An airport can facilitate an alternative mode of transport for specific types of goods and hence promote a country’s exports. In Albania’s case, not only existing textile and agriculture products could be competitively exported through air freight, but also air freight itself could improve Albania’s position to diversify into “nearby” industries, identified by the theory of Economic Complexity. Nevertheless, an effective air freight strategy does not and cannot uniquely depend on the simple availability of a nearby airport. Air cargo operations require both traffic volume that Albania may not be able to provide, as well as complementary cargo-specific infrastructure. Although the potential for air freight in South Albania could be high, it is by no means a safe bet nor does it imply with certainty significant impact in the immediate future.

What explains contemporary developed-world populism? A largely-overlooked hypothesis, advanced herein, is economic unfairness. This idea holds that humans do not simply care about the magnitudes of final outcomes such as losses or inequalities. They care deeply about whether each individual’s economic outcomes occur for fair reasons. Thus citizens turn to populism when they do not get the economic opportunities and outcomes they think they fairly deserve. A series of cross-sectional regressions show that low social mobility – an important type of economic unfairness – consistently correlates with the geography of populism, both within and across developed countries. Conversely, income and wealth inequality do not; and neither do the prominent cultural hypotheses of immigrant stocks, social media use, nor the share of seniors in the population. Collectively, this evidence underlines the importance of economic fairness, and suggests that academics and policymakers should pay greater attention to normative, moral questions about the economy.