Working Papers

The pandemic has progressed differently across the world. Using monthly data on COVID-19 cases and fatalities, we evaluate whether income inequality is an important factor in explaining cross-country differences in the spread and mortality of the virus. The results show that income inequality is positively correlated with the number of COVID-19 cases. Higher income inequality is associated with a more rapid spread of the virus and an increase in the number of cases, indirectly increasing mortality rates as well. Also, higher levels of inequality are associated with reduced effectiveness of social distancing measures in containing new infections. Thus, elevated inequalities place…

Between the many resolutions, speeches, reports and other documents that are produced each year, the United Nations is awash in text. It is an ongoing challenge to create a coherent and useful picture of this corpus. In particular, there is an interest in measuring how the work of the United Nations system aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is a need for a scalable, objective, and consistent way to measure how similar any given publication is to each of the 17 SDGs. This paper explains a proof-of-concept process for building such a system using machine learning algorithms. By creating a model of the 17 SDGs it is possible to measure how similar the contents of…