Uncategorized » TripleCrisis

Reforming the European Central Bank to Promote Economic Prosperity

In our blog in December we provide a quick critique of the ‘fiscal compact’ for the Economic and Monetary Union (‘euro area’) (now to be embodied in the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance). The fiscal compact is more rigorous in terms of the constraints on budget deficits of the member states in relation to those that were contained in the Stability and Growth Pact and the requirement for a ‘structural balanced budget’. The proposed Treaty (signed by all the European Union members with the exception of the UK and the Czech Republic, and currently under a process of ratification by national parliaments) makes no mention of the role of the ‘independent’ European Central Bank.

Read the rest of this entry »

Uncertainty as UNCTAD XIII begins

Martin Khor

The ministerial meeting of the UN Conference on Trade and Development kicked off to a good start last Saturday with a opening session marked by a modern play and dance depicting the inequalities of the modern world, and with speeches by an impressive group of political leaders, including the Emir of Qatar, the President of Tunisia who came to power in the wake of the Arab Spring, and the Prime Ministers or Presidents of Turkey and Bangladesh.

Most of them stressed the need to rethink the model of economic growth that was driven by a financial system that is now seen as dysfunctional and by a pattern of development that may be economically and environmentally unsustainable.

Read the rest of this entry »

UNCTAD’s future mandate on the line at UNCTAD XIII

Martin Khor

On 21 April, the UNCTAD ministerial conference known as UNCTAD XIII begins in Doha. It is shaping up as an important milestone to reaffirm – or not – the mandate given to UNCTAD to work on key global economic issues, including finance and macro-economic policy.

In fact, UNCTAD enjoys that mandate already, given its role in the UN system to organize an integrated perspective on trade, finance and economic issues.

However, some developed countries have attempted to dilute the specific issues that the UNCTAD secretariat has highlighted in recent years, especially in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brazil’s Neo-Developmentalist Lesson for Europe’s Unemployment Problem

Cornel Ban

During the post-war decades the direct creation of jobs through the expansion of employment in the public sector or through the government funding of public works was a reliable policy workhorse for employment policy. However, over the past three decades this policy has been replaced by market-oriented strategies such as labor market deregulation and cuts in corporate and marginal income tax.

Read the rest of this entry »

Using the Potential of BRICS Financial Co-operation

Jayati Ghosh

Strange things happen in the world. Imagine a grouping of countries spread across the globe, which gets formed only for the simple reason that an analyst for an investment bank decides that these countries have some things in common, including future potential for growth, and then creates an acronym of their names! Bizarre but true.

The original categorization by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs contained only Brazil, Russia, India and China – subsequently South Africa was added to the group. And while the origin of the grouping may be odd, and the countries are indeed remarkably diverse, there are some commonalities that are important. And in any case, these countries have since shown significant appetite for meeting periodically, working together, finding some synergies and new ways of co-operation. It is interesting to note that trade between BRICS countries soared after they became recognized as a combination, although of course this is a period when trade between developing and emerging markets in general has grown much faster than aggregate world trade.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brazil as an Emerging Environmental Donor

Kathryn Hochstetler, guest blogger

Brazil has acquired a new role in the 2000s: offering assistance to other countries in their national development efforts. In the climate negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, for example, former President Lula da Silva said that Brazil not only would shoulder its own costs of emissions reductions, but might even give resources to poorer countries to do so. This commentary examines Brazil’s experience as an environmental donor, placing it in the context of its emerging donor profile, and arguing that implementation of the promises is still incipient.

Read the rest of this entry »

Defending UNCTAD

Last week, guest blogger Robert Wade sounded the alarm about efforts on the part of some developed country governments to severely restrict the mandate of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) at the organization’s April 21-26 ministerial conference in Doha, Qatar. We follow up on that post with a sign-on letter from former UNCTAD senior staff members urging that the institution’s broad mandate be maintained, as a critical source of heterodox economic thinking and policy analysis. We reprint their letter and signatories below.

Statement by former staff members of UNCTAD

Geneva, 11 April 2012

Silencing the message or the messenger …. or both?

Since its establishment almost 50 years ago at the instigation of developing countries UNCTAD has always been a thorn in the flesh of economic orthodoxy. Its analyses of global macro-economic issues from a development perspective have regularly provided an alternative view to that offered by the World Bank and the IMF controlled by the west.

Now efforts are afoot to silence that voice. It might be understandable if this analysis was being eliminated because it duplicated the work and views of other international organizations, but the opposite is the case – a few countries want to suppress any dissent with the prevailing orthodoxy.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Geopolitics of Speculation: Oil-price makers and takers

Ali Kadri

Every market is a process of social and power relationships. In every market there are price makers and price takers. The oil market, however, is no ordinary market, and the struggle to control the oil market, therefore, is no ordinary struggle. With oil being rudimentary to global accumulation and the monetary system remaining in part commodity-based, the degree of control of the oil market translates into some degree of enhanced power in all other markets. But to control an oil market, the principal player, which is undoubtedly the US, has to develop a strategy of intervention at the source, military or otherwise, which cuts down to size other players. Consequently, the extent to which the US infuses tensions in oil producing areas, calibrates the degree to which oil-states relinquish sovereignty over oil and keeps at bay other major players are measures that represent the collateral necessary to lay the foundation of the oil-dollar standard. This unending power exercise constitutes the cornerstone of the commodity-money or, more concretely, oil-dollar based global monetary system.

Read the rest of this entry »

Financial Crisis, Productive Incoherence, and the Evolution of Southern Financial Architectures

Ilene Grabel

What is most notable about the global crisis of 2008-? is the way in which it is proving productive for institutional experimentation in the realm of financial architectures in the global South. As with the Asian crisis, the current crisis has promoted interest in alternative modes of financial governance. Indeed, in a new study—“Financial architectures and development: Resilience, policy space, and human development in the global South”– I find that the current crisis has stimulated the expansion of existing institutions and arrangements and the emergence of new ones in the global South.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whose elections should we watch?

Jayati Ghosh

For the past few months, the rest of the world has been watching (often with a mix of fascination and revulsion) the complicated progress of the choice of the Republican candidate for the US Presidential election in November. Media reports across the world have provided the minutiae of the candidates, their performances in various state primaries, their likes and dislikes, their stated policy positions, their private lives. And because of the media, people continue to track what the various candidates say on all sorts of issues and about each other, in excruciating and often repetitive detail.

Of course this is only to be expected – the United States is after all still the most “significant” country in the world, and the outcome of its domestic politics affects all of us in all sorts of ways, whether we like it or not. But the extreme global obsession with it may be somewhat misplaced, for at least two reasons.

Read the rest of this entry »