The tourism industry is frequently hailed as a catalyst for economic growth and job creation. In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic, it accounted for over 10% of global GDP and supported more than 330 million jobs worldwide. Tourist hotspots often transform into bustling economic hubs, with new restaurants, museums, and leisure establishments springing up to cater to the influx of visitors. Governments, eager for a post-industrial development strategy, increasingly turn to tourism as a potential solution. Policymakers in lower-income countries similarly advocate for it as a tool for fostering economic progress. Yet, does tourism truly fuel economic dynamism in these destinations, or is the relationship merely correlational? A deeper dive into the data reveals a nuanced picture. While tourists flood the streets of Barcelona and Madrid, the economic benefits of this surge are less straightforward than policymakers might wish.

Sexual harassment in the workplace is a prevalent issue that severely affect employees’ well-being, job satisfaction, and career growth, particularly for women. In France, one woman out of three will be victim of it over her career. The #MeToo movement revealed widespread sexual harassment and harmful behavior in workplaces around the world and brought heightened awareness to this problem. This led to greater scrutiny and demands for accountability while also creating considerable backlash with opponents of the #MeToo movement calling it a witch-hunt and saying that professional relationships between men and women would be forever altered.

The study of the economic impact of immigration in receiving regions has been a highly researched area for the past 30 years and continues to attract much attention from academics and policymakers1. Recent large population displacements have renewed interest in analysing the effects of large immigration inflows across locations. For example, recent papers have looked at local impact of large refugee waves from Ukraine or Syria.

Housing affordability is an increasingly important problem in cities around the world. In Europe, approximately one in ten families spend more than 40% of their income on housing costs, a situation referred to as “housing overburden”, which is particularly acute in cities (Eurostat, 2021). In Spain, 20% of tenant households are overburdened by housing costs, spending over 40% of their income on housing (OECD, 2021). The
extent and importance of this phenomenon has led to the coinage of the term “housing affordability crisis” (UN-Habitat, 2020).

A society’s civic sense is commonly understood to mean the respect that its citizens show to the rules of collective life, their involvement in the definition of these rules, and the priority they give to the general interest over private ones. In modern democracies, good citizenship is also commonly understood to include tolerance for the diversity of religions and political opinions, as well as support for the idea of equal rights for all citizens, regardless of gender and origin. These civic virtues have long been identified as central to the stability of democratic societies and to their economic development (see Putnam, 1993; Tabellini, 2008; or Guiso et al., 2011).

Lifetime inequality is due to multiple factors, including the environment where individuals grow and innate differences, such as differences in health at birth or simply in genes. A large strand of literature in economics and psychology demonstrates the importance of characteristics shaped in childhood in determining later-life success. Crucially, this literature shows that at least 50% of the variability of lifetime earnings across people can be attributed to characteristics determined by age 18 (see, e.g., Heckman and Mosso, 2014). This suggests that our income is largely determined by characteristics beyond our choice. Does this imply that some part of inequality simply reflects differences in innate endowments and is unalterable? It does not. Inequality based on differences in innate characteristics can, like other inequalities, be ameliorated via redistributive policies, such as compensatory education, or via parental investments.