The Center for Economic and Policy Research, founded in 1999, is a think tank which concentrates on economic research and public education. CEPR has focused on topics that affect people's lives, in order to contribute to public debate in the United States, and internationally.
Policy positions
CEPR has been described as both progressive and left-leaning. CEPR is based in Washington, DC.
CEPR supports the Affordable Care Act stating that it is "a family-friendly policy" and that the policy "has allowed thousands of workers to voluntarily reduce their work hours to care for children or elderly parents, or to explore new opportunities". Despite the increase in the percentage of workers employed on a part-time basis, CEPR concluded that such statistics were not sufficient to make any overall judgments on the health of the labor market.
A 2014 study by CEPR shows that 13 states that increased their minimum wage had an average payroll of 0.99% compared to 0.68% in other states, though the CEPR stated the analysis was "far from scientific".
Taxes
In a 2014 report in Fortune, CEPR co-founder Dean Baker suggested that according to poll findings, many citizens of the United States did not notice a 2% increase in their Social Security tax.
The CEPR created a blog called "Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch" on their website to keep watch on what has been taking place in Haiti following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Latin America
In 2008, Brazilian Foreign Secretary Celso Amorim cited CEPR's work to explain why Brazil had no interest in signing a free trade agreement with the United States. He said that the CEPR report concluded that the most severe impacts from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis will be suffered by those economies most integrated to United States, those that have free trade agreements with the US. CEPR has published at length about Venezuela and has been described as supporting Hugo Chávez and the Venezuelan government with some of the data presented by CEPR along with Weisbrot being accused by Francisco Rodríguez of using "slanted information" to support the Venezuelan government. Staff members such as Mark Weisbrot, CEPR's founder, and Deborah James, the former director of the Venezuelan government's Venezuela Information Office, have attended pro-Venezuelan government events alongside other activists such as Daniel Kovalik. Venezuelanalysis.com, a pro-Bolivarian website, has also used CEPR as their only source of economic indicators for their website since 2007. In October 2012, Weisbrot wrote an op-ed for The New York Times that stated in part, "lthough some media have talked of Venezuela’s impending economic collapse for more than a decade, it hasn’t happened and is not likely to happen." Later, in a July 2014 article titled "How to fix Venezuela's troubled exchange rate" written for Fortune magazine, Weisbrot attributed many of Venezuela's economic problems to their monetary policies such as the government's exchange rate system. In a June 2016 article titled "A U.S. Policy of Non-intervention in Venezuela Would Be a Welcome Change" written for the New York Times, Weisbrot blamed the U.S. for many of Venezuela's economic problems: "Washington has caused enormous damage to Venezuela in its relentless pursuit of 'regime change' for the last 15 years." in 2019, CEPR criticized the Organization of American States 's audit of the 2019 Bolivian general election, which concluded that the results of the elections should be voided because there were "drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results after the closing of the polls". Co-Director Mark Weisbrot contended that the report "provides absolutely no evidence — no statistics, numbers, or facts of any kind — to support this idea", and called on the OAS to retract its press release. CEPR asked researchers at the MIT Election Data and Science Lab to independently verify their work on the 2019 Bolivian election. The MIT researchers published a statistical analysis on 27 February 2020 confirming the results of the CEPR study and finding that there was no "statistical evidence of fraud that we can find — the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’s margin all appear legitimate. All in all, the OAS's statistical analysis and conclusions would appear deeply flawed" and that "it is highly likely that Morales surpassed the 10-percentage-point margin in the first round" as originally presented.
