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Goodbye 2016, a Strange and Difficult Year

The year will be remembered for the West ending its romance with globalisation, and its impact on the rest of the world.

Just a few days before Christmas, it is time again to look back on the year that is about to pass.

What a strange year it has been, and not one we can celebrate!

The top event was Donald Trump’s unexpected victory. It became the biggest sign that the basic framework and values underpinning Western societies since the second world war have undergone a seismic change.

The established order represented by Hillary Clinton was defeated by the tumultuous wave Trump generated with his promise to stop the United States from pandering to other countries so that it could become “great again”.

Early in the year came the Brexit vote shock, taking Britain out of the European Union. It was the initial signal that the liberal order created by the West is now being quite effectively challenged by their own masses.

Openness to immigrants and foreigners is now opposed by citizens in Europe and the US who see them as threats to jobs, national culture and security rather than beneficial additions to the economy and society.

The long-held thesis that openness to trade and foreign investments is best for the economy and underpins political stability is crumbling under the weight of a sceptical public that blames job losses and the shift of industries abroad on ultra-liberal trade and investment agreements and policies.

Thus, 2016 which started with mega trade agreements completed (Trans-Pacific Partnership) or in the pipeline (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the US and Europe) ended with both being dumped by the President Elect, a stunning reversal of the decades-old US position advocating the benefits of the open economy.

2016 will be remembered as the year when the romance in the West with “globalisation” was killed by a public disillusioned and outraged by the inequalities of an economic system tilted in favour of a rich minority, while a sizeable majority feel marginalised and discarded.

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Trekking the Gold Trail: Misinvoicing in Primary Commodity Exports

Léonce Ndikumana

Introduction

Exports of primary commodities are an important driver of growth in many developing countries. However, high resource endowment exposes these countries to the vagaries of large swings in commodity prices. And if “natural capital accounting” is applied so as to count the full cost of non-renewable resource depletion, the World Bank finds that 88 percent of African countries are net losers: the incoming profits and investment are less than the outgoing value of the minerals (World Bank, 2014). Moreover, resource-rich countries suffer from losses in foreign exchange and tax revenues resulting from under-reporting of export proceeds. Indeed, trade misinvoicing is a major concern in a global system characterized by lack of transparency and skewed distribution of gains from trade. Incentives for trade misinvoicing arise from the existence of opportunities for profit maximization and access to foreign exchange out of the control of the regulating authority. These opportunities are made possible by regulation of tariffs, customs procedures, export subsidies, and exchange controls, among others.

The issue of trade misinvoicing has been a long-standing concern in the economics profession since the seminal work by Jagdish Bhagwati in the 1960s.[1] The work was inspired by an even older strand of literature concerned with the consistency of partner data on international trade back in the 19^th century.[2] Interest in the problem of trade misinvoicing gained momentum in the 1980s in the context of the debt crisis;[3] since then it has taken prominence in academia and in the policy arena.[4]

Trade misinvoicing is defined as either perverse discrepancies or excessive normal discrepancies in partner trade statistics estimated through the comparison of exports as reported by the exporter and imports as reported by the importer. There are perverse discrepancies when recorded imports are significantly lower than recorded exports plus the cost of transport, insurance, and duties. This could reflect either export overinvoicing or import underinvoicing. Trade misinvoicing may be driven by factors associated with the country of origin or the destination of trade flows or both. Estimates of trade misinvoicing do not therefore permit to assign a priori the respective share of responsibility on the basis of the estimates of trade misinvoicing alone.

A recent report published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (prepared by the author of this note) examines the extent of trade misinvoicing of primary commodity exports from five resource-rich developing countries—Chile, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia (UNCTAD, 2016). The publication of the first version of the report in July 2016 generated interesting debates, partly motivated by the sheer values of export misinvoicing but also by what appears to be misconceptions regarding the nature of the data, the methodology and concepts used in the analysis. Some reactions to the report warrant a clearer exposition of the concepts and methodology of estimation of trade misinvoicing—which the new version of the report sought to clarify. Most fundamentally, there is a need for further improvements in the transparency of the reporting of trade statistics. The UNCTAD report and the debates that it has generated can be considered as a boost to further investment in knowledge generation in this area. This note presents some of the updated results using the case of gold exports from South Africa as an illustration, while responding to the main criticisms to the initial report. More detail is provided in the revised version of the report just published by UNCTAD (December 2016).

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The Shortcomings of Monetary Policy

Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer

The conventional wisdom on monetary policy from the early 1990s through to the financial crises of 2007-2009 favored inflation targeting operated by an “independent” central bank. This approach to monetary policy was widely accepted by academics and central bankers, and widely implemented by the latter. In a relevant contribution, we questioned the effectiveness of this approach to monetary policy along many lines (Arestis and Sawyer, 2008). These included the weakness of the supposed link running from policy interest rate to the level of demand in the short run, and to the rate of inflation in the medium to long run; and hence that the central bank did not have an effective policy instrument to control inflation. Further, we questioned whether the lower inflation experienced during the late 1990s and early 2000s could be attributed to the adoption of inflation targeting, as non-inflation targetters appeared to do as well as targetters, if not better in some cases (see, also, Angeriz and Arestis, 2007, 2008). The promotion of inflation targeting was based on a flawed model of the economy (the “New Consensus Macroeconomics”).

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TRIPS: The Story of How Intellectual Property Became Linked to Trade, Part 5

This is the fifth part of a seven-part series with Peter Drahos, a Professor in the RegNet School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. He holds a Chair in Intellectual Property at Queen Mary, University of London and is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. In 2004 he and his co-author Professor John Braithwaite won the Grawemeyer Award in Ideas Improving World Order for their book Global Business Regulation. Prof. Drahos is interviewed by Lynn Fries, producer at The Real News Network. Find the whole series here.

Full text below the break.

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Can Developing Asia Hold its Ground?

C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

The recent and ongoing capital flight from Asian markets comes in the wake of a longer pattern of sell-off that has been evident for nearly two years now. And this in turn reflects a deeper unease about the pattern of growth in this hitherto very dynamic region, and the receding prospects of such growth being sustained for much longer.

Of course, it is true that the current instability in global financial markets is obviously a reflection of major political upheavals in the North and their likely economic impact. In particular, the election of Donald Trump has made it all but sure that monetary policy will be tightened in the United States in the coming months (despite the protestations of independence by the US Federal Reserve Chairperson Janet Yellen). If this is combined – as is widely anticipated – by aggressively expansionary fiscal policy based on increased military and infrastructure spending and lower taxes on the rich and on companies, then the US fiscal deficit is also likely to increase. This combination will inevitably attract footloose global capital back into the US, causing currency and asset market havoc in many emerging economies.

Indeed, this prospect is probably already being priced in by many investors and fund managers, which is why currencies of developing countries across the world have depreciated in the weeks since the US election. But it is also true that internal forces and processes have played a role in encouraging capital flight from several of the more important emerging markets, especially in the Asian region.

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ISDS Corporate Rule of Law

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in ostensible free trade agreements (FTAs) and bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have effectively created a powerful, privileged system of protections for foreign investors that undermine national law and institutions. ISDS allows foreign corporations to sue governments for causing them losses due to legal or regulatory changes.

A law unto themselves

ISDS cases are decided by extrajudicial tribunals composed of three corporate lawyers. Although ISDS has existed for decades, its scope and impact has grown sharply in the last decade. As ISDS has been written into over 3,000 BITs and numerous FTAs, the opportunities for ISDS claims are huge and growing.

Originally justified as necessary to protect foreign corporate investments abroad from nationalization or expropriation by governments controlling national judiciaries, foreign corporations have used ISDS to change sovereign laws and undermine national regulations. As there is no cap on the amount of awards, claims – and awards – can be huge.

The system is secret and dominated by unaccountable corporate lawyers. As international arbitration is typically not transparent, pursuing such claims can avoid the public scrutiny associated with mounting legal challenges in courts. Lack of transparency means that lawyers acting as arbitrators or advocates in one case can be unnamed investors in other cases, as nobody would ever know.

ISDS proponents claim that the outcomes of cases are uncertain, and corporations only win about a quarter of the cases they pursue. But this does not include settlements agreed to before the conclusion of arbitration proceedings from which corporations often secure handsome benefits of some kind or other. ISDS arbitration is certainly far more attractive to foreign investors who would otherwise shy away from pursuing claims in other national courts, particularly against host governments.

Recent ISDS decisions have involved significantly greater delegation of authority to arbitrators in interpreting and applying the agreements concerned, without any meaningful review or opportunity to appeal the arbitrators’ decisions. There is no guarantee that tribunals will interpret treaty provisions in ways consistent with governments’ understandings of what treaty obligations mean.

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TRIPS: The Story of How Intellectual Property Became Linked to Trade, Part 4

This is the fourth part of a seven-part series with Peter Drahos, a Professor in the RegNet School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. He holds a Chair in Intellectual Property at Queen Mary, University of London and is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. In 2004 he and his co-author Professor John Braithwaite won the Grawemeyer Award in Ideas Improving World Order for their book Global Business Regulation. Prof. Drahos is interviewed by Lynn Fries, producer at The Real News Network. Find the whole series here.

Full text below the break.

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Trump and “National Neoliberalism”

Sasha Breger Bush

Sasha Breger Bush is an assistant professor in political science at the University of Colorado-Denver.

John Galbraith once noted that, “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” I’ve decided that I cannot heed his advice. I take solace in writing and am feeling empowered by it during these dark and strange times. I hope that my notes below contribute to the conversation that’s begun about what we can expect following Trump’s election. If these comments ever make it into history’s dustbin, perhaps those who find them will look upon them sympathetically, for these are uncertain times and no one really knows what will happen next.

I take as my starting point two assumptions:

Despite all the talk of Trump’s election being a backlash to a failed neoliberal project, I believe that neoliberalism is here to stay, at least for a while. Neoliberalism is far too embedded in American society and psyche to disappear with the mere choice of a new president, no matter how historic his election or how different his platform may seem. Neoliberalism is not poised to disappear, I think, but rather to change in form. This is related to my second assumption, which is:
Trump’s xenophobia, nationalism and isolationism will be reflected in new policies and initiatives that start to unfold after he takes office. The extent to which these values will be embraced in the United States and around the world, the manner in which they are incorporated into policy, and the potential national and international backlash to them are uncertain.

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