Labor Economics Journal - Covid Edition

This week, a Wall Street Journal article on Australia's agriculture industry included one particularly interesting statistic: 80% of Australia's produce harvesters are usually backpacking tourists. Covid-19 has greatly disrupted Australia's agricultural labor supply, as border closures and quarantine restrictions choke off this unusually significant flow of workers. These scenes are replicated across the world with the US banning new foreign workers in 2020 with visa restrictions. Such disruptions are speeding up the adoption of automation and robots to replace lost workers, but how will this expedited timeline impact job opportunities, industry dynamics, and society in general? Pandemic-driven automation will reshuffle industries like food and manufacturing, risk intensifying inequality, and demand policy changes.  Unlike the travel and hospitality industry, the food industry's work has intensified because of the pandemic. Coupled with outbreaks at locations like meat-...

In "Duck Dynasty vs Modern Family: 50 Maps of the US Cultural Divide," the New York Times repackages the way we visualize America's urban-rural divide. Such tribalism has dramatically manifested in recent years, but one way America can unify is to address urban-rural economic disparities. According to the Center for American Progress, " nonmetropolitan counties had yet to achieve pre-2008 levels of employment when the COVID-19 crisis hit ." Furthermore, rural areas " lag the nation in population growth and productivity, " and have especially low levels for upward mobility. One catalyst for closing this gap, surprisingly, may be the pandemic-driven rise of remote work. As people move from cities and spur "a boom for suburbs and rural areas," they bring with them wealth, skills, and attention; this in turn can improve rural infrastructure and job market access, helping boost the labor participation rate and productivity. The neglect of rural Am...