Trade Deals Must Allow for Regulating Finance

From the editors: This piece by Triple Crisis blogger Kevin Gallagher appeared previously on the Institute for New Economic Thinking blog.

Kevin Gallagher

World leaders who are gathering for the APEC summit next week had hoped to be signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The pact would bring together key Pacific-rim countries into a trading bloc that the United States hopes could counter China’s growing influence in the region.

But talks remain stalled. Among other sticking points, the U.S. is insisting that its TPP trading partners dismantle regulations for cross-border finance. Many TPP nations will have none of it, and for good reason. The U.S. stands on the wrong side of experience, economic theory, and guidelines issued by the International Monetary Fund.

Indeed, it’s the U.S. that could learn a few lessons from the TPP countries when it comes to overseeing cross-border finance.

Read the rest of this entry »

Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050

Editor’s Note: Timothy A. Wise and Marie Brill of ActionAid USA have co-authored a new ActionAid report “Rising to the Challenge: Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050,” based on a GDAE Working paper. The following op-ed published by Triple Crisis and the Huffington Post summarizes the findings of the their report.

Timothy A. Wise and Marie Brill, Guest Blogger

Was Thomas Malthus right after all? In 1798, Malthus postulated that exponential population growth would outstrip our ability to feed ourselves, dooming civilization. This early attempt at global economic modeling has since been widely discredited. But if you’ve been listening to policy-makers and pundits since food prices spiked in 2008, you’ve likely heard the eerie echoes of Malthusian thinking.

“With almost 80 million more people to feed each year, agriculture can’t keep up with the escalating food demand,” warned Frank Rijsberman, head of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). “FAO estimates that we have to double food production by 2050 to feed the expected 9 billion people, knowing that one billion people are already going to bed hungry every day.”

Well, not so fast. Yes, resource constraints, exacerbated by uncertainties over climate change and the unsustainable consumption of non-renewable resources have introduced new threats to our ability to feed a growing population. The issues are indeed serious, but the specter of looming food shortages is a bit overblown.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Emerging Left in the "Emerging" World: Two Areas of Continuity

Editors’ note:  This is the fourth and final part of “The Emerging Left in the ‘Emerging’ World,” by Triple Crisis founding contributor Jayati Ghosh, originally delivered in 2012 as part of the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. Find the first three parts of the lecture here, here, and here. In this week’s post, Ghosh discusses two areas of “strong continuity” between the traditional left and the emerging left: “the attitude toward the significance of the nation state and the attitude toward imperialism.”

None of these emerging left positions [the “seven common threads”] is completely new. There are many strands of earlier leftist thought that contain some of these features. The concern with women’s rights and the recognition of other forms of oppression, for example, can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels, as well as other socialist thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Still, the features outlined above do represent significant departures from the traditional left paradigm.

Meanwhile, there are two crucial features of strong continuity between the traditional and the emerging left: the attitude towards the significance of the nation state and the attitude towards imperialism.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Emerging Left in the “Emerging” World: Two Areas of Continuity

Editors’ note:  This is the fourth and final part of “The Emerging Left in the ‘Emerging’ World,” by Triple Crisis founding contributor Jayati Ghosh, originally delivered in 2012 as part of the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. Find the first three parts of the lecture here, here, and here. In this week’s post, Ghosh discusses two areas of “strong continuity” between the traditional left and the emerging left: “the attitude toward the significance of the nation state and the attitude toward imperialism.”

None of these emerging left positions [the “seven common threads”] is completely new. There are many strands of earlier leftist thought that contain some of these features. The concern with women’s rights and the recognition of other forms of oppression, for example, can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels, as well as other socialist thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Still, the features outlined above do represent significant departures from the traditional left paradigm.

Meanwhile, there are two crucial features of strong continuity between the traditional and the emerging left: the attitude towards the significance of the nation state and the attitude towards imperialism.

Read the rest of this entry »