Valuing the Oceans: The costs of climate change

Frank Ackerman

When you picture the effects of climate change, does a dying ocean come to mind?

Alongside the better-known terrestrial impacts of global warming, there are immense – and costly – damages that will occur beneath the waves. If we continue on our present course of unchecked carbon emissions, the losses due to climate change in five key ocean services could reach $2 trillion annually by the end of this century. Two-thirds of those losses could be avoided, effectively saving almost $1.4 trillion a year by 2100, if we embark on a rapid reduction in emissions to stabilize and protect the earth’s climate.

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The Real Inequality Gap: Rural Poverty

Edward B. Barbier

As attention in comparatively rich countries continues to focus on the problem of growing inequality – the so-called 1% versus the 99% debate – it is easy to forget the most important equity problem facing the world today.  This is the continuing problem of rural poverty in developing countries, and especially the tendency of the very poor in these countries to be concentrated in the most ecologically fragile, remote and marginal rural areas.  At the recent  Mount Holyoke Conference “Development in Crisis: Changing the Rules in a Global World”, I referred to this problem as the key challenge facing environmental sustainability and poverty eradication in the developing world.

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Prosperity and economic growth

Fander Falconí

Over the past two years much has been said in Europe about Tim Jackson’s book on ecological macroeconomics: “Prosperity without growth. Economics for a Finite Planet”, already translated into 30 languages. The author was responsible for the report on economics for the Sustainable Development Commission, an advisory body to the UK Government, in 2003-2011. Tim Jackson, well-known for his previous works on the social psychology of consumption, does not recommend the economic non-growth “medicine” to countries like India, China or Ecuador. But in countries where annual per capita income has reached USD 15 thousand, it is possible to verify that an increased income does not necessarily mean greater satisfaction or happiness. That is the so-called “Easterlin paradox”, corroborated through many a line of research.

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Over 100 Economists Endorse Jose Antonio Ocampo for World Bank President

Kevin P. Gallagher and Stephany Griffith-Jones

For the first time ever developing countries have officially nominated candidates to serve at the President of the World Bank. Acknowledging that the process whereby the World Bank President is chosen by the United States lacks legitimacy, the World Bank has pledged that the next President will be chosen based on the merits. With Yu Yongding from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, and Liqing Zhang from the Central University of Finance and Economics in China, the two of us circulated this petition endorsing Jose Antonio Ocampo for the World Bank Presidency. After just a few days from sending out our letter, you can see that we received overwhelming support from across the world, from renown academic economists, former Central Bank governors, and the heads of international agencies. It is our view, and the view of these economists, that Jose Antonio Ocampo is the best qualified to lead and reform the World Bank. We sent this letter and petition to the Executive Directors of the World Bank and post it here on the Triple Crisis blog.

Petition in support of World Bank presidential nominee Jose Antonio Ocampo

In relation to the forthcoming election of the President of the World Bank, in which you will play an important role, we wanted to express our strongest support for Jose Antonio Ocampo and provide some personal background about him which we hope will be of interest to you.

Jose Antonio Ocampo is outstandingly well suited for the job for three reasons. Firstly, he has had a distinguished career in his own country, where he was a highly successful and professional Minister of three portfolios: Finance, Agriculture and Planning. Therefore he has a deep understanding of policy challenges in developing and emerging countries.
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No Mysteries in Eurozone Crisis

Jeff Madrick

Little is more tragic about the eurozone crisis than that we know how to minimize it and provide the best chance for stability and growth yet we are not doing what we must. As an American, I should say ‘they’ are not doing it. It was just announced that eurozone unemployment reached a rate of 10.8 percent in February. What we should all recognize is that there are no mysteries about what to do.

The UK and the US have central banks of last resort. The Eurozone has resisted this. But the best evidence that such far more aggressive monetary policy is needed came last December when the relatively new European Central Bank chief, Mario Draghi, did an end-around and started to push hundreds of billions of euros into the banking system. Almost immediately, Spanish and Italian interest rates started to drop and Europe breathed a sigh of relief.

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José Antonio Ocampo for (World Bank) president

Kevin P. Gallagher

It is truly historic to be engaged in a global debate about who should head the World Bank. For more than 60 years the Bank presidency has been dictated by the US. Finally, the US and the Bank have pledged the institution’s next president will be chosen on merit, not hegemony.

On merit, José Antonio Ocampo is far and away the most qualified candidate to lead and reform the World Bank.

Many of the leading media outlets and key development professionals have praised the US in acknowledging the need to change the process and for putting forth Jim Yong Kim but have expressed concern that he may have too narrow a resume to run the Bank, given the many challenges it faces.

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No Thrust at Anti-Trust in US Agriculture: Lots of hope, little change in Washington

Timothy A. Wise

The Obama Administration raised hopes among U.S. farmers and consumers two years ago with its unprecedented series of public hearings on concentration in U.S. agricultural markets. The five hearings, convened by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice, took up key grievances about unhealthy levels of corporate power in agricultural value chains. (See my earlier blog post and my submitted comments on buyer power in hog markets.) The hearings showed a commitment to anti-trust enforcement in a sector that desperately needed it. No such luck. Journalist Alan Guebert, in a recent syndicated column, explains how this reform effort, like so many others in the last two years, has been largely gutted in a polarized Washington awash in lobbying money.

Bigger and bigger and …

Alan Guebert
(Reprinted by permission of author)

It was, literally, a sight for sore eyes.

Two years ago March 12, trumpets blasted in Ankeny, IA,  as America’s new gladiators for agricultural justice—U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr., his antitrust chief Christine Varney, U.S. Department of Agriculture boss Tom Vilsack and hundreds of farmers—gathered for a day-long discussion on “competitive dynamics of the seed industry; trends in contracting issues, marketplace transparency and buyer power; and agriculture enforcement and cooperation at the Federal and state levels.”

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An end to modern medicine?

Martin Khor

Last week the head of the World Health Organisation sounded a large alarm bell on how antibiotics may in future not work anymore, due to resistance of bacteria to the medicines.

Antibiotic resistance has been a growing problem for some time now. From time to time, there will be news reports of the outbreak of diseases, old and new, that cannot be treated because the bacteria have grown more powerful than the antibiotics used against them.

And experts have been warning about how the wrong use of antibiotics has given the bacteria the opportunity to develop resistance, enabling them to become immune to the medicines.

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Minding the Gap: A conversation about economic inequality

Arjun Jayadev

On March 13th, I spoke on a panel at MIT with David Autor, Peter Diamond and Frank Levy (all from MIT) on inequality in the U.S.

The two hour discussion on inequality went over a broad range of issues:  the alarming rise in inequality,  the nature of the ‘religion of meritocracy’ that underpins the  notion of the American dream, the role of childhood and early education in reducing inequality and the implications of inequality for distorting the way political decisions are made.

The facts about inequality are better known, due to the rise of the occupy movement as well as more careful work documenting the rise of top-income inequality. In 1980, the top 1 percent of U.S. households earned about 10 percent of the nation’s income; today that top percentile receives about 25 percent of income. The top 10 percent of households accounted for a bit more than 30 percent of income from World War II until about 1980, but now receives 50 percent of all income.

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The oil price conundrum

C. P. Chandrasekhar

All eyes are on the world’s oil market, with prices threatening once again to find a new high. The immediate cause for increased attention is a spike in oil prices since the beginning of the year.  With that 20 per cent rise taking Brent crude to $128 a barrel in early March 2012, there are fears that the price of oil may soon touch the peak $140-a-barrel it had reached in July 2008. The IMF’s Managing Director, Christine Lagarde, has declared that rising oil prices were now a bigger global worry than the debt crisis in Europe. Ali Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister also stoked fears rather than assuaging them when he said that Saudi Arabia was willing to ramp up its production to the tune of 25 per cent to bring down the “unjustified”, high price of oil.

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