CNE – Centro Para Una Nueva Economía – Center for a New Economy
Non-profit, economic research and policy development organization
In 1923 John Maynard Keynes published his Tract on Monetary Reform, which was his first attempt to analyze the monetary instability that plagued the post-World War I world. In classic contrarian fashion, one of Keynes’ conclusions was that central bankers – by shackling tehemselves to the “barbarous relic” of the gold standard – were actually exacerbating monetary problems.
On June 29, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the American Clean Energy and Security Act by the narrow margin of 219 to 212. This comprehensive bill, which now moves on to the Senate, seeks to create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, and reduce global warming pollution.
In one of his best-known poems, William Butler Yeats wrote that there are times when things fall apart and the center cannot hold; when the best seem to lack all conviction and the worst run about full of passionate intensity. A pithy summary, perhaps, of the times we are living in Puerto Rico.
This Fiscal Update Report prepared by the Center for a New Economy (CNE) presents an independent analysis of the proposals contained in the Governorā€™s budget request for fiscal year 2009-2010. The analysis is based on CNEā€™s evaluation and interpretation of the budget data, rather than the Administrationā€™s, and may incorporate estimates made by CNEā€™s staff or by other private sector analysts.
In 2008, the Center for the New Economy, in fulfillment of its mission to provide rigorous, independent analysis to policymakers, the press, and the public at large, established a fiscal analysis program to monitor and keep track of important fiscal trends affecting the Puerto Rican economy. As part of that program, we developed a series of budget performance indicators, which we have updated with data from the budget for fiscal year 2009-10.
Some economists in the U.S. have started to talk about the Great Recession of 2009 when analyzing the current economic downturn. In the U.S. alone, home equity lost, between 2006 and 2008, $4.2 trillion; the value of retirement assets has declined by $2.3 trillion; while other investments and savings show losses of an additional $2.5 trillion.
In this paper we examine the establishment and operations of a CDA program in Caguas, Puerto Rico. This program affords us an opportunity to test whether asset-building policies can provide a new approach to social welfare in Latin American countries and Hispanic communities in the United States, a middle way between paternalistic, government-based social programs on the one hand and so-called neo-liberal approaches on the other.
Professors Steven Davis and Luis Rivera Batiz, in an analysis conducted for their contribution to the book The Economy of Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth, published in 2006 by the Center for the New Economy and the Brookings Institution, found that a “truly striking feature of Puerto Rico’s economy is the underdeveloped state of its private sector.” According to their analysis, private sector employment rates in Puerto Rico are less than half the U.S. rates in recent decades.
