For more than a quarter century now, most emerging market and developing nations have been integrating themselves with the world economy. Some of these globalizers have done fairly well in terms of per capita income, but not Mexico. All of a sudden, Mexico is seen as one of the most promising destinations for emerging market trade and investment. Has Mexico learned the lessons of the past or will this spurt of attention be squandered like so many times in the recent past?
Growing Out of the Food Crisis: Mexican Smallholders Key to Food Sovereignty
Since prices spiked in 2007-8, policy-makers have rediscovered small-scale farmers. Where the Washington Consensus treated them as unproductive, an anachronism in the modernizing global economy, suddenly they were once again “stewards of the land.” Raising their productivity, closing the “yield gap” – the difference between current and attainable yields using readily available technologies – became one of the pillars of the global response to the new food crisis. In theory, anyway.
In our new study, we documented that this is an attainable goal. We showed that small-scale Mexican corn farmers can close a yield gap estimated at 43% or more, and they can do so relying on existing technologies by investing in good old-fashioned farmer-led extension services. This would eliminate Mexico’s 10 million ton annual deficit, which it now fills with $4 billion worth of imports from the United States. And it would improve resource use while increasing resilience to climate change.
Fueling the Food Crisis
Tim A. Wise: Bio-fuels are driving up the price of food everywhere and costing developing countries billions
Timothy Wise is the author of the recent paper “The Cost to Developing Countries of U.S. Corn Ethanol Expansion“
Economic Growth, “Development,” and the Triple Crisis: Reflections on El Salvador and Gold Mining
Let me introduce myself as does my business card: I am a professor of development. I am aware that most mainstream economists – and even many so-called development professionals — define progress primarily through the lens of aggregate economic growth. Yet, my recent research in El Salvador shows why this definition of progress is wrong.
El Salvador is poor by almost any economic measure, be it per capita gross domestic product or per capita income. But a rich vein of gold lies buried beneath its mountains. This has led some prominent individuals in that country to argue that gold mining is the ticket to economic growth and therefore “development.” Former Salvadoran finance minister and mining company advisor Manuel Hinds said that renouncing mining would be “globally unprecedented” and “unjustifiable.”
Announcement: Alice Amsden Memorial Conference to be held in honor of pioneering economist.
On the 19th and 20th of this month a conference will be held at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) in honor of the memory of Alice Amsden, a pathbreaking economist who challenged many of her field’s pieties in pursuit of a clear-eyed analysis of late capitalist development in East Asia and beyond. She passed away on March 15th, 2012 at the age of 68, in Cambridge where she was the Barton L. Weller Professor of Political Economics at DUSP. She had been awarded GDAE’s 2002 Leontief Prize for her outstanding contribution to economics. Below are posts in her honor.
Finance Resurgent: Out-of-Control Banking Threatens Us More Than Ever
Eli Epstein-Deutsch
After the world economy nearly imploded in 2008, we all supposedly learned hard lessons about unregulated markets, greedy traders, “too-big-to-fail,” opaque credit instruments, and shadow financial institutions. Surely, bankers are contrite, regulators are vigilant, and we’re at least headed for a few decades of recovery and relative safety like those that followed World War II? Not necessarily, argue several leading economists in interviews on the Real News Network. Shadow banking and the sprawling, unregulated derivative market are thriving again. Moreover, the longer trendline, which extends back to the late 19th Century, reveals a striking story: that of finance’s ever growing dominance within the global capitalist economy, and the diversion of more and more resources towards itself at the expense of other sectors. Watch the videos below to learn more.
Farming Under Occupation
Anna Lekas-Miller, Guest Blogger
Beit Ummar used to be known as the fruit basket of Palestine.
Nestled in the Hebron Mountains, the old Beit Ummar was covered in olive orchards and trees bearing brightly colored lemons, plums and dates. Lush, leafy vineyards wound their way through the meandering mountain roads, bearing robust grapes often used for the stuffed grape leaves or sweet grape syrup that the region is renowned for.
The orchards and vineyards are still there, but they are no longer vibrant with color. Like a photograph that has been leached of its saturation, the once abundant orchards and fruit trees bursting with hues of bright yellows, rich reds and warm, deep purples are now ragged, parched and covered in dust.
Peter Spiegler on "Economics-Made-Fun"
I normally blog about issues related to finance or distribution, but this time I thought I might try something somewhat different. I’m not particularly expert at questions of economic methodology, but found this paper to appear in the latest Journal of Economic Methodology by my very smart colleague at UMass Boston Peter Spiegler to be really interesting.
Over the last decade or so we have all had to endure (I use the term advisedly) what may be termed the ‘economics made fun’ (EMF) genre of books. The bestseller Freakonomics for example has had enormous success, selling over 5 million copies to date and launching a whole cottage industry of books (some better and some worse that blended pop culture, armchair theorizing and quantitative economic methods to come up with surprising and ‘fun’ (counterintuitive or shocking) conclusions.
Peter Spiegler on “Economics-Made-Fun”
I normally blog about issues related to finance or distribution, but this time I thought I might try something somewhat different. I’m not particularly expert at questions of economic methodology, but found this paper to appear in the latest Journal of Economic Methodology by my very smart colleague at UMass Boston Peter Spiegler to be really interesting.
Over the last decade or so we have all had to endure (I use the term advisedly) what may be termed the ‘economics made fun’ (EMF) genre of books. The bestseller Freakonomics for example has had enormous success, selling over 5 million copies to date and launching a whole cottage industry of books (some better and some worse that blended pop culture, armchair theorizing and quantitative economic methods to come up with surprising and ‘fun’ (counterintuitive or shocking) conclusions.
News Flash: Small outbreaks of sensibility in an insensible global financial system
The bad news is familiar. The financial crisis continues to grind on. Fiscal policy in many countries remains firmly in the hands of austerity obsessives and supply side retreads. The IMF continues to press its traditional recovery-through-strangulation formula in Southern Europe. Indeed, in recent weeks the Fund has intensified pressure on Greece’s government to go further in the direction of destroying its social fabric through new spending cuts (on public sector salaries) and tax hikes. This has understandably driven Greeks to the streets and caused another stalemate between the government and the Troika. The same kinds of social tensions are spilling over daily in Spain and Portugal as the unemployed and impoverished mobilize to protest new austerity measures that the government is invoking to stave off the need to turn to the Troika.