Climate Change and the Immigration Debate

Lyuba Zarsky

Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration law has galvanized popular protest and reignited demands in many quarters for an overhaul of US immigration policy. For those hoping that Obama’s next big legislative battle would be over climate change, however,   the immigration firestorm could not have come at a worse time. Besides eclipsing climate change in public debate, the shadow of Congressional action on immigration scuttled the support of a key Republican, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for a Senate climate bill. Without Lindsey, the climate bill doesn’t have a prayer.

But apart from political minefields, are immigration and climate change such separate policy issues? Not if climate change is understood, as it should be, as a problem requiring urgent action both not only to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions but also to adapt to much more volatile local and regional climatic conditions driven by global warming.

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Getting Ready for Rio+20

Adil Najam

Officially speaking, the preparatory process for the Rio+20 Earth Summit to be held in Brazil in 2012 begins on Monday, May 17. But by real measures the discussions – even negotiations – on Rio+20 have now been going on for many weeks.

Certainly, the recent meeting of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-18, 3-14 May, 2010) was largely consumed by the shadows of Rio+20.

The world has already decided that there will be a “Rio+20” conference: the official title is “The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.” They seem hesitant to call it a “Summit,” let alone an “Earth Summit” just yet, but it is nearly certainly that eventually they will. It is, after all, the 20th year commemoration of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, which itself had marked 20 years since the 1972 Stockholm conference.

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Seeing Development: India in the Latin American Mirror

Matías Vernengo

China and India are often seen around the world as examples of successful developing strategies that should be emulated by other developing countries.  They are also often lumped together with Brazil and Russia, as part of the BRICs, the group of countries that would overtake the developed world by mid-century.  Brazil and Russia, however, are to great extent commodity exporters, and the Brazilian success story has been over-hyped.

The case of India is of particular interest for developing countries, since it suggests that high rates of growth are possible, in the context of a multicultural, multiethnic, democratic society.  Also, India seems to provide an alternative model in terms of the pattern of structural transformation of the productive sector, with a pronounced acceleration in the growth of the service sector in an early stage of the industrialization process.  The growth in services is, in part, associated with the expansion of services exports, which, in turn, are related to the offshoring process.

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Big Finance and the Greek Drama

C.P. Chandrasekhar

The Financial Times reports that banks in Europe have appealed to the European Central Bank to become a “buyer of last resort” of eurozone government bonds, to prevent another financial crisis. Though the European Central Bank (ECB) is yet to take a decision on the matter, the option has not been ruled out. The ECB is also planning on launching a loan facility which will offer funds to the tune of €600 billion to banks at a one per cent rate of interest to tide over the current funds crunch.

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Global Financial Crisis: Hardest on the Least Developed

Mehdi Shafaeddin

The recent global economic crisis has been unprecedented since the great depression of 1929-32. The low-income countries have been affected by the crisis severely, particularly because of their low capacity to take external shocks. The commodity boom of 2003-08 allowed increases in national savings, investment and the acceleration of GDP and market value added (MVA) of low-income countries. Nevertheless, it was followed by a “bust” with detrimental impact on their long-term industrialization and development. Food and fuel importing countries, in particular, suffered from both the “boom” and the “bust”; the emergence of the financial crisis took place at the time they were facing high international prices of food and petroleum. In other words, they faced three ‘F’(food, fuel, financial)  crises.

As a result of the global economic crisis, the prices of non-oil primary commodities and petroleum fell, from the peak to the trough, by over 36 per cent and 68 per cent, respectively. Nevertheless, food prices did not fall as much as the prices of other commodities and have picked up faster than other commodities after they reached their trough in December 2008.

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Going Beyond Immigration Policy

Timothy A. Wise

Democratic Party leaders recently introduced their latest proposal to reform U.S. immigration policy.  The proposal, which is given little chance of passage in a polarized election year, offers carrots and sticks in an attempt to bring some semblance of order to a broken and outdated policy that has left nearly 12 million people in the United States without legal documents.

The carrots are few and shriveled: an arduous path to U.S. citizenship for those already in the country.  The sticks are large: a further crackdown on border enforcement and increased policing to catch and punish those without papers. No combination of carrots and sticks will address the immigration issue unless reform efforts also take up the agricultural, trade, and labor policies that feed migration.

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Defending the Indefensible: Behind the Alleged Financial Fraud at Goldman Sachs

Jeff Madrick

Goldman Sachs’ arrogant public response to the Securities & Exchange Commission accusation of fraud is another example of self-righteous overconfidence on Wall Street. Not that the SEC suit will be won by the government. In fact, that’s partly what’s given Goldman its chutzpah.  Odds are pretty high the investment bank will prevail in court. Whether it told investors that the hedge fund manager John Paulson shorted the portfolio of mortgage bonds in which they invested—or synthetically invested, so to speak — may be beside the point legally.

What is not defensible ethically or economically were the ratings on the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) itself — the structured investments that Goldman repeatedly sold, and the likes of which Merrill Lynch and Citigroup sold more of.

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Losing Control: Capital Controls and Trade Agreements

Kevin P. Gallagher

Do nations have the policy space to deploy capital controls to prevent and mitigate financial crises? In a new report for the Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on International Monetary Affairs and Development (G-24) I examine the extent to which measures to mitigate the global financial crisis and prevent future crises are permissible under a variety of bi-lateral, regional, and multi-lateral trade and investment agreements. I find that the United States trade and investment agreements, and to a lesser extent the WTO, leave little room to maneuver when it comes to capital controls. This is the case despite the increasing economic evidence showing that capital controls can be useful in preventing or mitigating financial crises.

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Capital and Development: Coping with the Carry Trade

Jayati Ghosh

Once again, emerging markets have become the (often unwilling) “beneficiaries” of a surge in private capital flows. Once again, this is not really being used within most receiving economies, since they continue to add to their external reserves. And once again, this is creating additional and often complicated problems of macroeconomic management, with conflicts between different domestic goals.

Some of this renewed capital inflow relates to the perceptions of private investors about better long term economic growth prospects in countries like China, India, Brazil and so on. But much of this is simply what is known as the “carry-trade”, which is essentially the attempt to benefit from different rates of return on assets in different currencies.

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Ecological Economics and Money: Nadal Responds to Daly

Alejandro Nadal

The Triple Crisis Blog and The Daly News blog are engaged in an interesting discussion of how the field of Ecological Economics treats money, partly in response to Alejandro Nadal’s piece on Triple Crisis, “Money Matters, Mr. Daly.” Herman Daly posted a comment there and posted a piece on the subject on his own blog, “Money and the Steady State Economy.” Rob Dietz also has a related post there, “Money is a COW.” Here, Nadal, author of the forthcoming volume from Zed Books, on the macroeconomics of sustainability, responds:

I’d like to make three comments:

1. For a very long time trade liberalization was the only dimension of macroeconomic policy that attracted the attention of scholars concerned with sustainability. That monetary reform is now being discussed in this connection is a step in the right direction. Both Daly’s and Dietz’s contributions will help move the debate to a field of analysis that has been badly neglected.

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