"Gather and Sell": Ghana's Illegal Gold Industry

Thomas Lee, re-posted from World Policy Institute

Following Triple Crisis blogger Lyuba Zarsky’s piece on mining and sustainable development, we bring you celebrated photojournalist Thomas Lee’s vivid photo essay on Ghana’s black market gold industry from the World Policy Institute. Triple Crisis is pleased to announce the World Policy Institute as a blog partner.

Deadly Gold

Dunkwa-on-offin, Ghana—An illegal gold mine collapsed in these remote jungles on June 27, 2010, after heavy rains hit central Ghana. At least 100 people were buried, but that’s just an estimate. The owner had no idea how many of his 136 hires were working at the time of his arrest, and the dozen illegal miners who survived kept their mouths shut, fearing prosecution. This is hardly a rare incident, but it provides a vivid snapshot of the deeply rooted abuses in Ghana’s ancient and ever more profitable gold complex. Theo and his team head to work as dusk begins to fall at the illegal gold mines in the bush of Kenyasi, Ghana.

View the full photo essay at World Policy Institute.

“Gather and Sell”: Ghana’s Illegal Gold Industry

Thomas Lee, re-posted from World Policy Institute

Following Triple Crisis blogger Lyuba Zarsky’s piece on mining and sustainable development, we bring you celebrated photojournalist Thomas Lee’s vivid photo essay on Ghana’s black market gold industry from the World Policy Institute. Triple Crisis is pleased to announce the World Policy Institute as a blog partner.

Deadly Gold

Dunkwa-on-offin, Ghana—An illegal gold mine collapsed in these remote jungles on June 27, 2010, after heavy rains hit central Ghana. At least 100 people were buried, but that’s just an estimate. The owner had no idea how many of his 136 hires were working at the time of his arrest, and the dozen illegal miners who survived kept their mouths shut, fearing prosecution. This is hardly a rare incident, but it provides a vivid snapshot of the deeply rooted abuses in Ghana’s ancient and ever more profitable gold complex. Theo and his team head to work as dusk begins to fall at the illegal gold mines in the bush of Kenyasi, Ghana.

View the full photo essay at World Policy Institute.

Can Mining Promote Sustainable Development? Maybe, But Not Without State Muscle

Lyuba Zarsky

For decades, progressive economists have argued that, as a development strategy, mining is a “resource curse”.  The main reason is that capital-intensive mineral exploitation creates enclaves with few positive spillovers, i.e. linkages to the local economy, and many negative social and environmental spillovers. Moreover, the rents and returns generated by mining can be—and in case after case have been shown to be—captured by local elites and foreign shareholders rather than distributed to or invested in local communities.  The upshot is that large-scale mineral-led development retards economic growth and innovation and promotes corruption and social conflict.

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Consequences of the Financial Crisis: The Responsibility of the State

Gerhard Schick

The public discussion about the root causes and consequences of the financial crisis seems to be over before it  really began.  In Europe, the discourse focuses on the astonishing economic recovery, rather than the roots of the crisis and how we can prevent a recurrence.

What would it take to prevent a recurrence? In addition to rebalancing the relationship  between the state and the financial sector,  the state must regain its dominance and its capacity to act, independently from the financial sector. What might this take?

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Are High Agricultural Prices Good or Bad for Poverty?

Timothy A. Wise

Dani Rodrik is back, and he reignites an old debate with his recent blog post. He asks if high food prices are good or bad for poverty, and answers, “It depends on whether the poor are selling or buying, of course.” Citing a recent paper by Jacob Swinnen, he goes on, “High food prices benefit poor farmers who are net food sellers, and hurt poor food consumers in urban areas. Low food prices have the opposite effects. In each case, the net effect on poverty depends on the balance between these two effects.”

Seems obvious, but not so fast: What if the poor also work for wages and agricultural prices affect labor markets? Sandra Polaski and others have shown that when one incorporates labor market effects of high vs. low agricultural prices, high prices will clearly be better for many developing countries.

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A Lesson in US Job Creation: The Civilian Conservation Corps

Frank Ackerman

How could the Obama Administration have spent two years in office and forgotten to create any visible new jobs for the millions of unemployed Americans? Nothing contributed as much to the Democrats’ midterm electoral losses as the high rate of unemployment; the party in power routinely gets clobbered when lots of people are out of work on Election Day.

Once upon a time, there was a much smarter response to unemployment. In fact, I recently spent a week enjoying the results of the wisdom of the past. In a vacation trip to Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon National Parks, I walked on trails, protected by retaining walls and guardrails, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. The CCC, part of the Roosevelt Administration’s response to the Great Depression, created vast numbers of jobs – 600,000 at its peak – in repairing, protecting, and improving parks, forests, and other natural resources.

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Latin America Must See China as a Trade Threat as well as a Partner

Kevin P. Gallagher

As global attention to China’s expanding economic influence grows, Triple Crisis blogger Kevin P. Gallagher published the following opinion article in the Financial Times on China’s role in Latin America. It draws on his new book with Roberto Porzecanski, The Dragon in the Room: China and Future of Latin American Industrialization.

Latin America must see China as a trade threat, as well as a partner

Major Chinese investment in Latin America is now a regular event: Sinopec’s $7.1bn investment in Repsol’s Brazilian unit is just the latest example. Such deals are rightly celebrated with fanfare in Latin America. However, the long-run effects are uncertain – especially given that Latin American exports are losing badly to their Chinese counterparts in world markets.

Latin America needs to diversify its exports – away from oil, iron, soya, meat and the like – if it is to grow sustainably. Unfortunately, as the region has focused on selling its commodities to China, Chinese firms have been outcompeting Latin American manufacturing exporters at a frightening pace.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Latin America looked to the US as a core economic partner, adopting the Washington Consensus in order to attract US investment and gain better access to US markets. Alas, in the twenty years up to 2002, Latin America grew by barely one per cent a year in per capita terms.

Read the full article at Financial Times.

Read more on Gallagher’s work on China in Latin America.

What History, and the Budget, Bodes for the Tea Party

Mark Blyth and Akim Reinhardt, Guest Blogger

The results are in from the US midterms and as expected the outsiders are the new insiders. Tea Party candidates continue to make inroads. Rubio and Paul succeeded where O’Donnell and Whitman failed, but the momentum is theirs. From this point on the Democrats’ nightmare is that for the next two years these ‘no-compromise’ Republicans will produce policy gridlock and blame the Democrats for it. The anger that brought them to power will build in the face of a staled economy and a stalled Congress, and more such candidates will be elected in 2012, possibly even a President bearing their mark. But even if this happens will they really be able to radically alter American politics and the trajectory of federal spending? It is perhaps worthwhile then to look back upon similar ‘outsider’ eruptions in American politics to ask if the Tea Party really will mark a sea change in American politics.

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US Elections: The Deficit Hawks Have Already Won

Jeff Madrick

Austerity economics has won in Europe. But there is a mythology traveling around that the U.S., at least, has retained the Keynesian orientation that helped cut short an economy spiraling downward into full-fledged depression. Not so. The deficit hawks have also largely won in the U.S.  The announcement last week that GDP grew at an annual rate of 2 percent only brings the point home: the U.S. needs a serious fiscal injection quickly.  But it is not going to get it.

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Understanding Instability: Mandelbrot, Fractals, and Financial Crises

Alejandro Nadal

Lightning in the sky does not follow a straight line. The irregular patterns in a cauliflower or the capricious forms of a tree’s branch are a challenge to the clean geometric figures we learn in school. Neither the straight lines, nor the smooth curves of that geometry exist in nature. But after the wonderful work of Benoit Mandelbrot it is now possible to get closer to a theory of the manifold wrinkles and rough surfaces that are the stuff of our universe. And our economies.

Ten days ago this great mathematician, the creator of fractal geometry and other wonders closely related to chaos theory, passed away.

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