TripleCrisis

Using the Potential of BRICS Financial Co-operation

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The World Bank Presidential Race

Triple Crisis blogger Kevin P. Gallagher was recently interviewed by Boston University’s blog Professor Voices to weigh in on the World Bank Presidential nominees and why he is endorsing Jose Antonio Ocampo. Last week, he and Triple Crisis blogger Stephany Griffith-Jones launched a petition signed by more than 125 economists endorsing Ocampo’s candidacy. Gallagher also published two op-eds in support of Ocampo in The Guardian and Financial Times.

Read the full petition in support of Ocampo here.

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.

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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.

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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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Can a low-carbon economy thrive in a resource-constrained world?

Eric Kemp-Benedict, Amanda Fencl and Elena Dawkins, guest bloggers

There’s a growing momentum around the world to build a ‘green’ economy – with a special focus on energy – as a key strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent dangerous climate change while also increasing energy security.

But resource constraints could hinder this endeavour. Low-carbon technologies such as photovoltaics, wind turbines, and electric and hybrid cars, for example, use metals that are mined only in a handful of countries, which can limit their availability. This is already a major international issue, as evidenced by the recent complaint filed by the U.S., the EU and Japan with the World Trade Organization, challenging China’s restrictions on exports of rare-earth metals.

Biofuels development, meanwhile, has faced substantial push-back because of concerns that fuel crops will displace food crops – or displace forests and vitally important ecosystems. In addition, these crops compete for what are often limited water resources.

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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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