September » 2012 » TripleCrisis

Clean Air for a Cooler Planet

James Boyce and Manuel Pastor

There is good news and bad news about the clean energy transition. The good news is that half the new electric generating capacity installed worldwide in 2008-2010 was renewable. The bad news is that half wasn’t.

To avoid rapid global warming and its attendant human and economic risks, we need to accelerate the transition. We need to do more than slow growth in the use of fossil fuels: we need to cut their use substantially. This will require significantly ramped up investments worldwide in energy efficiency and clean energy.

One way to encourage this investment is to base public policies on the full range of benefits from reduced burning of fossil fuels – not only global benefits from reduced greenhouse gas emissions, but also local benefits from reduced emissions of particulates, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, mercury, benzene, and other toxic pollutants.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let's Not Get 'Carried Away' by Ben Bernanke's Latest Twist

Kevin Gallagher

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, should be applauded for boldly putting employment over price stability in his latest move to keep interest rates low and to purchase mortgage-backed securities. Bernanke’s critics (and Bernanke himself) have rightly said that monetary policy is not enough, however. To truly generate employment-led growth in the US, those critics say more fiscal policy is needed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s Not Get ‘Carried Away’ by Ben Bernanke’s Latest Twist

Kevin Gallagher

Read the rest of this entry »

Occupy Roundup: A Global Movement Turns One

Eli Epstein-Deutsch, Triple Crisis Assistant Editor

This September 17th, a flurry of actions and gatherings in and around Zuccotti Park marked the anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protest, which gripped the media last fall and sparked copycat encampments and marches across the world. What this all means depends on who you ask. To its critics, including Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times, OWS is but a passing craze that has proved itself to be an empty suit (or an empty Guy Fawkes mask).

Mostly, he points to its lack of concrete policy accomplishments in the United States, though it has undeniably had a significant effect on the national discourse (even Mitt Romney paid lip service to the “99%.”) Moreover, “Occupy” has spread far beyond the bounds of the United States, influencing and framing politics internationally, from Madrid to Seoul to Rio. Encampments in Frankfurt and Hong Kong, indeed, long outlasted their Anglophone counterparts, only to be dismantled in the last few months. It seems clear to us that much of the global Occupy story remains to be written…

Read the rest of this entry »

Economic Prospects: Getting Real on Jobs and the Environment

Robert Pollin, Guest Blogger

President Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus program—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—represented a dramatic forward advance on the issue of jobs and the environment. The ARRA included roughly $100 billion in clean energy investments as part of the overall $787 billion two-year measure. The ARRA also embraced the concept that green investments could serve as a significant new engine of job opportunities throughout the economy. This idea directly contradicted the long-dominant view that the goals of environmental sustainability and job creation were inevitably and painfully at odds.

Read the rest of this entry »

India's supermarket move shows its tired government has run out of ideas

Jayati Ghosh

Allowing foreign chains such as Tesco to open in India will drive up unemployment and exploit small producers.

India’s ruling coalition has been rocked after its second-largest partner withdrew this week. The latest round of political instability comes about because prime minister Manmohan Singh announced a number of economic measures without consulting his allies. The announcements – that diesel prices were to be raised, and that India’s retail and domestic aviation sectors were to be opened up to overseas companies such as Tesco – were the government’s attempt to woo back foreign investors who had become cynical about India’s growth prospects.

Read the rest of this entry »

India’s supermarket move shows its tired government has run out of ideas

Jayati Ghosh

Allowing foreign chains such as Tesco to open in India will drive up unemployment and exploit small producers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Africa can win the fight against poverty if it can keep its resources onshore

Léonce Ndikumana

The growth surge observed in Africa before the global financial crisis (about 6 percent real GDP growth rate during 2001-2008) and its resilience during the crisis (2.8 percent growth) continue to nurture optimism with regard to the continent’s future economic prospects. These developments feed hopes that ‘Yes, Africa can’[1] win the war against poverty, hunger, and deprivation.

Indeed, at the continental level, there has been a steady decline of the poverty headcount from 59% in 1994 to 48% in 2008. However, the long-term gains in poverty reduction appear modest, with only a 3 percentage point drop over 3 decades from 1981 to 2008.[2] But most importantly, even as the poverty headcount declined, the absolute number of the poor has increased steadily from 205 million to 386 million during this period, in contrast to Asia where the poverty headcount and the number of the poor have declined simultaneously. Thus for Africa the glass is half-full or half-empty depending on the observer’s degree of optimism.

Read the rest of this entry »

Obamacare a boon after all

Jeff Madrick

Lo and behold, Mitt Romney says he will now support parts of the Affordable Care Act, which the Republicans disdainfully call Obamacare. The Financial Times called it a u-turn. My prediction is that the word Obamacare will conjure up the same positive connotations as Medicare now does.

Read the rest of this entry »

Developing countries: from the “de-coupling thesis” to victims of the global crisis

Martin Khor

It wasn’t so long ago that the “decoupling” thesis took hold: i.e., that developing countries had de-coupled their economies from the advanced countries, and were growing at far higher rates.

The (silent) accompanying tune was that these emerging and poor countries no longer need assistance from the rich nations, which had become the new laggards of the global economy.

When the 2008-2010 financial crisis hit, it was obvious that de-coupling did not hold, as developing countries experienced plunging exports, decline in commodity prices, lowered GNP rates and some poorer ones wobbled on the brink of new debt crises.

Read the rest of this entry »