EPI in the news

• The case for immigration

  This is not, incidentally, because an increase in the labor supply has no adverse effects for anyone. Rather, as Heidi Shierholz of the liberal Economic Policy Institute emphasizes in her overview of the literature, it’s that “earlier immigrants are the group that’s most adversely affected by immigration” because they are the people whose skill sets are most likely to put them in direct competition with new immigrants. Across a range of estimates, the effects on wages “tend to be very small, and on average, modestly positive.”

  VOX | April 3, 2017
• 7 Ways People Try To Mansplain The Wage Gap

  April 4, 2017 is Equal Pay Day, and while data proves that women make up to 22 percent less than men for doing the same job, many still refuse to believe the wage gap exists. A wage gap infographic from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) illustrates some of the reasoning used to mansplain away why men still earn more than women in every field. What’s more is that the date chosen to highlight the wage gap between men and women is not arbitrary. April 4 is how far women have to work into 2017 to earn as much as their male counterparts did in 2016, according to the EPI.

  Bustle | April 1, 2017
• Trump to target trade abuses with executive orders

  Several economists said it’s unlikely that the planned report would address the broader economic forces behind the trade imbalance, since it would track trade deficits country-by-country and product-by-product. And the order on trade duties appears to duplicate the standards of a trade enforcement act signed into law by then-President Barack Obama in 2016, according to congressional staff. “It seems like there is less here than meets the eye,” said Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Together, the orders appear to be a symbolic shot at China, which accounted for $347 billion of last year’s $502 billion trade deficit

  The Associated Press | March 31, 2017
• Trump just kicked off NAFTA renegotiation. Here’s what history tells us about how that’ll go.

  NAFTA went into effect in January 1994, and it worked. Trade grew exponentially. Agricultural trade between the United States and Mexico tripled from $7.3 billion in 1994 to $20.1 billion in 2006. And the job cuts didn’t come. But the Congressional Research Service said that the “net overall effect of NAFTA on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest, primarily because trade with Canada and Mexico accounts for a small percentage of U.S. GDP.” The Economic Policy Institute pegs the jobs loss from NAFTA at about 700,000 through 2010. It did not, however, keep Mexican immigrants out. Americans got more militant in response. The number of U.S. Border Patrol agents at the border increased by 67 percent between 1994 and 1997, and it became much more militarized — at some points, as many as 10,000 U.S. soldiers were deployed to secure the border.

  The Washington Post | March 31, 2017
• Half of college graduates are earning less than they did in 2000

  But not everyone is feeling gains, particularly in the wage department. According to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, the bottom half of wage earners with college degrees have lower wages than they did in 2000 or 2007. So how is it that many college grads are making less than they were over 10 years ago? “What we’ve seen is a pulling away of the very top, and that’s been growing wage inequality, income inequality, wealth inequality,” said Elise Gould, an EPI senior economist and author of the report. “By any measure of economics, we’ve seen this growing inequality happen. And what that means is that the vast majority of workers have really not seen gains in wages over the last several years, and that affects college grads too.”

  Marketplace | March 31, 2017
• Donald Trump Is Focused on the Wrong National-Security Threat

  Wage stagnation and economic inequality: These two conditions explain a large part of the working-but-barely-making-it phenomenon. Let’s start with those stagnant wages. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), for about three decades after World War II, hourly wage increases for workers in non-supervisory roles kept pace with productivity increases: at 91.3 and 96.7 percent, respectively. Then things changed dramatically. Between 1973 and 2013, productivity increased by 74.4 percent and wages by only 9.2 percent. In other words, with wages adjusted for inflation, the average American worker made no more in 2013 than in 1973. As for economic inequality, the EPI reports that from 1980 to 2013 the income of the top 1 percent of wage earners increased by 138 percent compared with 15 percent for the bottom 90 percent. For those at the lowest end of the wage scale, it was even worse. In those years, their hourly pay actually dropped by 5 percent.

  The Nation | March 31, 2017
• Black Americans Are Working More—With Little to Show for It

  Valerie Wilson and Janelle Jones, economists at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, took a look at labor data for black and white workers between the years 1979 and 2015. They found that both black and white workers, between 18 and 64 years old, have increased their number of paid, annual hours of work in the past 36 years. According to the analysis by Wilson and Jones, the average black worker in 2015 put in 1,805 hours, or 12.4 percent more hours than they did in 1979. By contrast, the average white worker put in 1,888 hours, for an increase of around 11 percent. While those trajectories may seem similar, the picture looks a lot different when it comes to the lowest-wage workers in each racial group. When looking at the lowest earners, black workers have seen much more significant increases.

  The Atlantic | March 30, 2017

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