Patrick Bond: Rio+20 official meetings a bust as green market mechanisms prove a failure
India’s Economic Slowdown: The marvel of services-led growth?
Suranjana Nabar-Bhaduri, guest blogger
Recent months have seen public concerns being voiced about the incipient slowdown in the Indian economy. Manufacturing output grew at only 0.1 per cent in April; the Indian rupee has been on a downward spiral since late 2011; exports have fallen; and capital inflows have been inadequate relative to India’s current account deficits. India’s GDP growth has declined to a nine-year low of 6.5 per cent in the financial year 2011-12.
The current situation draws attention to issues surrounding India’s services-led growth development strategy, and its persistent trade and current account deficits. It will hopefully provide a much-needed wake-up call to Indian policy-makers to undertake policies beyond “reforms”. A recent paper emphasizes that India’s services-led growth entails questions of long-run sustainability with respect to its balance of payments (BOP) and has a limited ability to raise the living standards of the population as a whole.
What We´re Reading and Writing
What We’re Reading
South Centre, The EPAs and Risks for Africa: Local Production and Regional Trade
Robert Pollin, The Great U.S. Liquidity Trap of 2009-11: Are We Stuck Pushing on Strings?
Columbia University, SIPA’s Ocampo and Co-Author Bértola Win Jaume Vicens Vivens Prize for Best Book on Spanish or Latin American Economic History
Stefano Pagliari, The Making of Good Financial Regulation. Towards a Policy Response to Regulatory Capture
Mark Halle, Life after Rio
Shiney Varghese, Human rights and Rio+20
IISD, Summary of the Meeting
Prideaux/MWN, ‘The Future We Want’ delivers little for migratory wildlife
FAO, Infosylva: Rio+20 Special Issue
Adam James, Andrew Light, Gwynne Taraska, How the Rio+20 Earth Summit Could Have Been Better
George Monbiot, After Rio, we know. Governments have given up on the planet
Tierney Smith and John Parnell, Rio+20: Five climate change ideas that didn’t make the Earth Summit outcome
Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Food, finance and climate crises are fundamental failures, not short-term glitches
What We’re Writing
Jayati Ghosh, India and the Credit Rating Agencies
C. P. Chandrasekhar, When the Law Takes its Course
Patrick Bond, Market Failure at the Rio+20 Earth Summit
Mark Blyth and Stephen Kinsella, Spain Is Now Making Ireland’s Mistakes
Today’s Trivia Quiz: How Global Mining Corporations Are Able to Undermine Democracy
Robin Broad, guest blogger
Today’s trivia category is how global mining corporations undermine democracy.
First a bit of background. The way licensing for mining works is that a company first gets an “exploration license.” With that license, that company gets the right to explore – or test – the area to get a better sense of the extent of the gold or whatever the relevant mineral is. After that, the company can move on to apply for an “exploitation” or “extraction” license — that is, an actual mining license. Different countries have different requirements for both licenses but typically a company would be asked to present an environmental impact assessment and a feasibility assessment among other things.
Spotlight Rio+20: Faith in the Financial Sector
Part of the Triple Crisis Spotlight Rio+20 series.
Rio+20 came and went. The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) could have been an important event. Instead it set new standards on how to make oneself irrelevant. One quick recipe: pretend you have never even heard of the global economic and financial crisis!
Spotlight G-20 & Rio+20: Not Enough: Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security at the Three Summits
Part of the Triple Crisis Spotlight Rio+20 and Spotlight G-20 series.
It has been encouraging to see the promotion of an environmentally sustainable approach to agriculture and food security endorsed by three recent high-profile summits: the Rio +20 Conference and the G20 Leaders’ Summit this month, and the G8 Summit last month. But they did not offer up anywhere near the kind of public financial support, or the regulatory framework, required to implement it.
In L’Aquila in 2009, the G8 governments, later supported by the G20, pledged some $22 billion for agriculture and food security initiatives in developing countries over the 2009-12 period. But the ongoing economic crisis has prompted rich country governments to significantly scale back what they are now willing to commit.
Spotlight G-20 & Rio+20: Not Enough: Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security at the Three Summits
Part of the Triple Crisis Spotlight Rio+20 and Spotlight G-20 series.
It has been encouraging to see the promotion of an environmentally sustainable approach to agriculture and food security endorsed by three recent high-profile summits: the Rio +20 Conference and the G20 Leaders’ Summit this month, and the G8 Summit last month. But they did not offer up anywhere near the kind of public financial support, or the regulatory framework, required to implement it.
In L’Aquila in 2009, the G8 governments, later supported by the G20, pledged some $22 billion for agriculture and food security initiatives in developing countries over the 2009-12 period. But the ongoing economic crisis has prompted rich country governments to significantly scale back what they are now willing to commit.
Spotlight Rio+20: Follow up is key after Rio+20
Part of the Triple Crisis Spotlight Rio+20 series.
The Rio+20 summit last week was disappointing to many, but it could still succeed through the mandated follow-up actions
Because the world is facing serious crises in the global environment and economy, much was expected of last week’s Rio+20 summit.
Thus there was deep public disappointment that the hundred heads of government and state who came to Rio de Janeiro were unable to take decisive actions.
Spotlight Rio+20: A Hard Slog Towards Sustainability
Part of the Triple Crisis Spotlight Rio+20 series.
The Buddhists say enlightenment—the ability to see clearly and act appropriately– is to be found in the “middle path” between grasping and pushing away, expectation and aversion.
Attitudes about the likely outcomes of the Rio+20 Conference seem to fall into one camp or the other. Some grasp towards hope that the “outcome document” produced via intense negotiations by 191 countries—what UN General Secretary Ban Ki Moon called a “historic agreement”– will translate into a global action plan for a green economy. Others, like the NGO leader Antonio Tujan Jr, find the agreement repulsive, “an empty coffin” in which the sustainable development promises of the first Rio conference will be buried. Many grumbled even before it began that the Conference would be a waste of time, a global gabfest akin to fiddling while the planet burns.
Stimulating Europe
Stephany Griffith-Jones and Matthias Kollatz-Ahnen, guest blogger
Strategies to overcome the European crisis only focused on collective austerity are not working; they are bad arithmetic, worse economics and ignore the lessons of history. A key missing ingredient is the urgent restoration of growth, which European citizens demand and several leaders are increasingly stressing. However, meaningful actions on a sufficient scale have not yet been taken.