Researchers find that racial inequalities cost billions in the U.S. economy

Sept. 8 (Reuters) – Racial and ethnic inequities have cost the U.S. economy about $ 51 trillion in lost production since 1990, San Francisco Federal Reserve Chairman Mary Daly said Wednesday. quotes data from a paper she and three co-authors will present at The Brookings Institution.

Large and persistent loopholes in employment, education and income rates between races “add up to a smaller economic pie for the nation as a whole,” Daly said in a briefing ahead of the newspaper’s launch Thursday.

“The imperative of equity, to close some of these gaps, is not only moral, but also economic.”

The document shows what GDP would have been if there were no shortages in the labor market.

The employment of black men, for example, is constantly lower than that of men of other races.

Black and Hispanic workers ’earnings are also lagging behind whites.

Daly and his co-authors calculated what the gains in GDP would be if these and other race-based gaps were erased: if black and Hispanic men and women held jobs at the same rate as whites, if they finished college. at the same rates as whites, and if they earned the same as whites.

From labor alone, they imagined, profits would add up to $ 22.9 trillion over the thirty years from 1990 to 2019, with larger gains in recent years as the proportion of non-white populations has increased. while the differences have remained fairly constant.

The higher $ 51.2 trillion estimates the capital investment increase factors that could be expected to generate a more productive workgroup, Daly said, and includes $ 2.57 trillion in 2019 alone.

The paper was written with Shelby Buckman, a graduate student at Stanford University, Lily Seitelman, a graduate of Boston University, and Laura Choi, vice president of community development for the San Francisco Fed.

Ann Saphir Reports; edited by Richard Pullin

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