Hello, and welcome to Stephan Mix, the podcast that brings the global economy to you, and there's no way around it. We have an exercise in contrast on the program this week in a few minutes, a hopeful report from Indonesia on the new breed of work anywhere digital nomads and how governments are redesigning their visa policies to attract them.
But before that, we have to talk about the dramatic reduction and female reproductive rights that occurred in the US last week when the Supreme Court overturned Row versus Wade. The respected Oxford political economist Nyrie Woods has a troubling global take on that decision. I have a fascinating conversation with her in a few minutes. But first, here's Bloomberg u S economy reporter Katia Dmitrieva. Do you have the money to be a single mom? Like? What would you
what would you do? You have? Three thousands? Say exactly, But I don't have the time to find at work, Like where's the money going to come from? I'm just gonna take care of the baby. Don't I have to go to work there right now? Like every month, I just say, let's say three hundred to five. I have to pay a babysitter, now, food, diapersonal that I'm not gonna have money. I'm just gonna be working to pay rent and to have a baby. So it's like, no, what's the life out of that? That was Jane, a
student from Honduras who now lives in Texas. She's describing what went through her head earlier this year after discovering she was unexpectedly pregnant, but without the financial resources or support to afford a child, and unwilling to take the health risk. Jane, who's not using her real name for fear of legal action or deportation, I knew that she wanted an abortion, but getting one in a state that passed tough restrictions just last fall was a different story.
She would end up breaking the law to get care. Her only other option was to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. Jane's experience could now become a reality for millions of people across the US. After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, thirty three million people won't have access or affordable access to care. Women who have found greater equality in society and a greater foothold in
the economy may lose that. David Slusky, Associate professor of economics at the University of Kansas, says the consequences are profound. Loss of access to abortion, um and reproductive healthcare substantially worsens the household financial outcomes and preventive care rates, and educational attainment and income and professional advancement. Results in more children to single mothers and to poor families and families with the least resources to take care of these children.
It's tough to highlight immediate economic cause and effect, partly because they take place across years, decades, and generations. Professor Sluski was one of the one fifty four economists who sent a brief to the Supreme Court in support of upholding abortion access. They argued that three decades of research has shown that it positively impacts a woman's lifelong finances, wage potential, education, family wealth, and even things like credit scores.
Those who benefit most are young women and women of color, like Jane. I spoke with her in her apartment near Dallas in May. She's been in the US for about seven years but is not legally able to work to afford groceries rent and tuition. She works under the table at a residential construction company, answering the phones up until April. She also had a second job cleaning office buildings at night, but lost it after severe morning sickness. Neither job provides
paid time off or health benefits. Well, I that week that I was feeling really sick, they asked me like, no, we don't have someone to substitute you. And I had to go work like that, having nauseous and just feeling like headaches, and they were like, no, you don't have a substitute, so you have to go to work. I just felt really bad, like I'm telling you, I'm sick.
The law in Texas prohibits abortions after roughly six weeks, and for Jane, the few remaining clinics in the state were so booked up that she probably would not have been able to secure an appointment in time. I'm like, oh my gosh, because I cannot take time off from my job. I already missed a week. I don't have seek weaker, so I was just like, oh my gosh, I cannot. I cannot waste one work one more week.
So it's already seven and a half. Yeah, so it's like I can't go to another place, like I need to have them up home. If I go to Plan Parer or whatever, they're gonna say like you're ready more than six weeks. So Jane ended up taking pills her friend sent her in the mail illegal in Texas to induce an abortion after seven weeks. One side effect of overturning row is that abortions are getting more expensive. That's something Reverend Daniel Kantner of the First Unitarian Church of
Dallas hopes to help with. He's been working with other groups to fly women from Texas to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to get abortions after the six week mark, free of charge. Some of the women already have children and can afford or don't want more. Many have jobs, all of them are below the poverty line. I spoke with him last month at a rally in Dallas when the Supreme Court's road decision was leaked and protests erupted across the country. And these are the poorest people in in our communities.
This why when I say about this issue is it's a war on the poor. It's black and brown women and they're all poor, and they're all you know they have no way to get themselves to the support, So that's why we're in this now. Understandably, the Supreme Court's ruling has triggered a lot of debate and soul searching in the US and around the world, and as Katie has suggested there, the implications for American women and for the US economy are likely to be profound and quickly felt.
But we take a global view on Stephanomics, and when you do that, you can see that the US is not the only place where female freedoms are under attack. Narie Woods is the Dean of the Blavatnic School of Government and Professor of Global Economic Governance at the University of Oxford, and she has made this point very forcefully in a piece for the Project Syndicate website. I'm delighted to say that Nara is here with me now. Thank you very much for doing this for for Stephanomics. Snarry,
It's always lovely to talk to you. In your piece, you talk about an increasingly wide ranging attack on women's liberty. What kind of attacks are you thinking of? So? Yeah, I mean, which is important because the Supreme Court are balancing on the one side what they describe as the autonomy of women, and on the other the rights of the unborn child, and and I think people aren't looking
at what's happening to the autonomy of women. So I in my article looked at two things, and one is what's happening to the upholding of the right of women not to be attacked and raped. That's a pretty basic
formal autonomy. And yet what we're seeing, even in the United States and in the United Kingdom, which are two countries which consider themselves to have a robust rule of law, what we're seeing is ever increasing numbers of rapes being recorded and reported to the police and declining numbers of rapes being prosecuted. And and in Britain it's quite a lot to do with with the cuts and funding to the Crown Prosecution Service, cuts and funding to the court system.
So you know, there's a number of cases where the police work really hard to put the file together, but the case just doesn't get prosecuted, and when it does, it's, you know, two or three years after the rape occurs, the alleged rape occurs. So so my point was, you know, it really struck me when I saw a young protester saying you know, if I don't know, if I don't want a baby, I shouldn't have sex. Um. And I thought, well, do all women in the world actually have that choice?
When we look at global statistics on how many women suffer rate and sexual abuse, whether in the home or in the streets. Um, it's frightening. Um. And then you say, well, women are not actually having that choice. And when you say, well, whose job is it to uphold that autonomy? It's the
job of all of society. But in societies where there's rule of law, you would expect it to be the government's job to ensure that the police, the court system, a criminal justice system, and the prosecution system are all
working effectively to protect the autonomy of women. And as you suggest, it's not just about what laws are there, because it's even we're not seeing laws enforced with the kind of resources needed to try those rape cases, as you suggested, But there are also changes in legislation that are going against women. And I noticed, you know, we're not just talking We're not talking about developing countries here. I mean there's European as members of the European Union
that have been banning abortion. I think, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe is that that is also a bit of a trend. Yeah in Poland. You know, go further north to Russia, and you know the world was aghast that Russia decriminalized domestic violence or categories of domestic violence
a few years ago. But the people who were aghast at Russia decriminalizing it, I think, failed to look at their own countries and the fact that although it might be on the statute books that it's illegal, it's not
being prosecuted, and other efforts aren't being made. And what we do know and that the positive side of the story is that actually violence against women, both rape and domestic violence, they really are preventable things that the World Health Organization and the United Nations have very very clear lessons and guidelines about how any government and country and society that wants to can really set about preventing violence
against women. And you know that the sadness for me is that the Supreme Court, instead of looking in that direction, looking forwards and saying, let's up hold the rights of the unborn child and the rights of women and the liberty of women, instead look backwards and say, well, what is liberty? Until you know, the late twentieth century, Um, there was no right to abortion, so why should there
be one now? And if they seem to overlook the fact quite deliberately that in that version of liberty until there was no right for women to vote, there was no right for women to divorce, there was no right in some countries for women to have property. There was no right not to be raped if they were married to the rapist. So so looking backwards to define liberty takes us back to defining liberty as a concept, which you know, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was liberty
for white men. And I think that's very worrying in the Supreme Court judgment decision. And I want to say we'll have a little bit on the economic implications in a minute, but just thinking about what's driving this, I mean, there's obviously been particular governments that have come to power in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. There's certainly political moves in Russia have taken taken us in that direction.
But did COVID also make somehow there's a more better environment for for for infringing on women's rights or not not protecting women's freedoms enough, I think COVID. You know, the UN and the World Health Organization both tell us that COVID hugely increased the problem. That in all countries in which you had lockdowns, you saw more women being attacked in their homes, more domestic violence, are more abuse, and at the same time less access to help, less
access to justice, less access to support organizations. So the effect of COVID is to have increased the problem. The the the deeper question you're asking is did COVID reduce the city to solve this? Did COVID unleash a greater instinct towards authoritarianism and populism in populations? Um? You know, we've we've here at the Blevanney School, we've done an Oxford Government Response tracker. And one of the correlations that's clear is that countries that had stringent lockdowns for a
long time have had the strongest political backlash against governments. UM. And that can make it difficult. It also makes it more tempting when there's a backlash against government for um, what some people would call populists, but for people with exclusive, narrow extremist messages to kind of dog whistle to certain parts of the population, to play to fear and anxiety to use, you know, the crack cocaine of a kind of that narrow exclusive nationalism or or culture wars to
elicit political support. And just to follow over thought, I mean, the other be thing that has clearly helped to normalize some of those more extreme physicians and bring it more into the public domain as social media. We see that very clearly affecting also women's involvement in politics itself absolutely, and the frightening thing there is how international and universal
that is. You know, in my article, I sight the evidence from Japan, from Sweden, from Canada, from the United Kingdom, in all countries, the social media attacks that women are suffering are quite specific. It's not that women get more online harassment than men. It's that they get a very different kind of online harassment if they're politicians that politics. Male politicians get harassment for their for their policy platforms.
Women politicians get a kind of sexualized, threatening, physical, very very personal abuse which makes their jobs terrifying in the instances. And just to take things back, I mean, we tend to focus more on the economics in this program, but I think it's been it's it's valuable to tease out all of these other elements. But you know, we have heard a lot this week in the US about the likely rise in maternal death there and the number of children living in poverty as a result of making abortion
illegal or so much harder to get. And you know, clearly there's a lot of economic fallout for an economy if women have more children than they're ready for. Do we have any evidence of the economic impact. I guess it's much just much less tangible. But if women are less vocal in public debates, if they're discouraged from politics, if there's a sort of chilling effect on that, on there,
on those kind of discussions. On your first point, we have very clear evidence that abortions in the United States are more and more the resort of very poor women. And we have very clear evidence from decades of development economics that the more children a woman has are, the
less likely the prospects of those children. The less educated a woman is, the less value she has as a person in her own right other than as a mother, the more likely she is to have a very large number of children, not just as a choice, but also
as a as a as a circumstance. And if we put all that together we see that if we want a flourishing society with well educated, well nourished children UM, and a society of people that can and will take up jobs for which they need to be educated, we've got to be looking at the rights of the born child, not just the rights of the unborn child. And this exclusive focus on the rights of the unborn child UM does a terrible thing to society. It says, where interest
than you until you're born. But the day you're born, you can live in complete poverty and have very little chance of being educated or having opportunities in life because our duties only extended to your moment of birth. Marry words, thank you so much. So here's the handbrake turn, because we're heading to Bali, where the government's changing its visa policies to attract not just spiritual types looking to find themselves,
but digital nomads looking for son and good WiFi. Further evidence of the way that the COVID pandemic has changed the world of work, at least for the lucky few who can work from any home they want. Here's Indonesia Economy reporter Claire Yow. For the last two years, COVID has redefined or working life. We got used to the convenience of rolling out of bed and into a meeting and the ease of spending the entire day in pajamas.
As we emerge from the pandemic, that's opened a debate on what exactly the new world of work should look like. On one side, there are business leaders like Testlas Elon Musk urging everyone to spend at least forty hours a week in the office or else. In leaked emails sat to Teslas executive staff, Elon Musk told them, for the most parts quotes, if you don't show up, we will assume you have resigned. On the other there's Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, who announced that all their employees can
live and work anywhere in the world indefinitely. Flexibility is the future. After compensation, Flexibly will be the most important benefit employers can offer. The best people aren't just in Silk and Valley either, not just in New York. The best people are now everywhere in Any company that limits their talent pole to a commut eating radius around the office will be at a disadvantage. And then there's the middle ground, living and working somewhere on an extended working vacation.
It's longer than your usual holiday, but shorter than permanent residents. It's called business leisure travel. One of the joys of Bangkok for me is the amazing cooking just about everywhere here. I am along a street side getting some tad tie before I bring it on home. Meet David Abraham. He's the co founder of Outpost, a co living and coworking community in Southeast Asia. Think of it as we work for travelers. He runs this business on the goal this
week out of Bangkok, next week in Bali. Like many of us, though, he used to be tied to an office desk, working in the likes of Lehman Brothers and the White House. It wasn't until a trip to Asia
in twenty twelve that he changed his mind. Thursday afternoon, and I was in a Starbucks in Tokyo, and I was doing work as I usually did, and I raised my head and looked around and saw a number of other people working and wondered, well, if they had to be working in Tokyo and they were away from the office, why did they even have to be in Tokyo at all?
Why couldn't they be in an amazing place like Polli, and that's where I ended up, and the idea of of coming in and creating a productive space for people like myself was born. It all sounds great, but there's just one little snag. The question our potential gates are asking is also this, like how leiggal is it for me to come and stay and work from there? This is Thomas Despin. He runs a resort called Reconnect on
a remote island in Indonesia. Like David, he was also lured by the idea of business leisure travel, the beauty of having the best of both worlds. So when you live in here, you have access of course to like the whole island um to a pristine cold reef right in front of the beach whites and beach. You have access to all the water activities, so standard battle kayak, you can go fishing with the local badge of people.
You can do all kind of beach activities, and of course you have your own private space to focus and work from without any destruction. M But when it comes to immigration and tax issues, remote work tends to be a gray area. Take Indonesia for example, Tourists can keep entering on a thirty day visa, but staying in the country for six months out of a twelve month period would make you a tax resident in the eyes of the law. This freak Thomas out since he was operating
US based business while staying in Bali. So when he saw the law, he tried to file his income tax at the local office, but he was met with confusion from the authorities, and so actually went to the tax office in in January in Bali and they loved him. I gets really loved there, Like why would you pay taxes here? They say, you know, so just you know, like go back to La Engine to stay here, you don't have to pay any tax. So that was actually fun.
It's not just workers who are grappling with this. Companies are too. They worry that the presence of their employees in another country could make them obligated to pay corporate taxes there. That's not even counting the social security and labor obligations they would have to comply with. According to a survey by the h CFO Network, almost of companies said corporate taxes are their biggest concern around allowing remote work.
Personal taxes are a closed second to that end. Tourist hot spots like Thailand are moving fast to modify these rules and lure these business leisure travelers onto their beaches. Travelers will soon be able to apply for a long term resident visa if they want to work remotely from Thailand. The visa lasts for five years and comes with tax incentives. Here's Thai Tourism and Sports Minister peep At Chakrakari, did you don't know that we want tax digital nomads? Their
income is generated from overseas. So if you earn money from other countries and come to work and travel in Thailand, the Thai government won't collected text from you. There's no such tax. You will only be taxed on your spending. The value added tax rate is as seven percent. That is an equal charge for both locals and foreigners. And then across the ocean and Indonesia could also offer its own five year viewsas soon, targeting remote workers and retirees.
Tourism ministers san Diego says that's potentially a billion dollar opportunity for the island nation from millennials. Gen z all the way to order entrepreneurs to reside in Vali or any parts of Indonesia. With the support of digital infrastructures,
they can conduct their businesses. Uh. And this is something that is so huge because one trillion dollars worth of potentials that we can read, and if we could convert that twenty you would see a three billion US dollars worth of potentials that we could turn into business opportunity and create jobs for the economic recovery. Despite the strong will of policymakers, the legal wrangling could take years to
catch up. But David Abraham of Outposts is optimally stick that we're on the fast track now more than ever. If we're talking in two thousand seven right now, and you were talking to the future me, and you would tell me I could just go and to someone else's house and spend a few nights there and I can pay them and that's legal, I'd say, well, that's crazy. But Airbnb came about. And then I can go into someone else's car who's not regulated, that's not a taxi,
and I can pay them to drive me anywhere. And so what I think, what we see over time is that regulations do evolve and and and things do change. Um. Business travel has always been in this nebulous situation. When I go to a conference and and and speak do I come in on? What regulation? Do I come in under? Um There's always been a challenge that that companies have had to had to navigate, and I think they've done
it quite effectively. Now there are new visa regimes coming in, but I think that this is definitely a manageable situation. As for governments, remote workers are a much needed lifeline for a tourism sector that was so badly beaten during the pandemic. From Manila Claiyo from Bloomberg News, that's it for this episode of Stephanomics. Will be back next week, but in the meantime, do please rate the show if you like it, and check out the Bloomberg News website.
It's Bloomberg UK in the UK. For more economic news and views on the global economy. You can also follow at Economics on Twitter. This episode was produced by Magnus Hendrickson, Samma Sadi and Young Young, with special thanks to Katya Dmitrieva, Professor Nirie Woods, Claire Yeow, Certainly, you, Wet Watana, and Michelle jim Risco. Mike Sasso is executive producer of Stephonomics and the head of Bloomberg podcast is Francesco Levi m h m m