India’s Bilateral Investment Treaties: Worst fears realised

Jayati Ghosh

The Government of India has signed at least fifty Bilateral Investment Treaties – we do not know exactly how many because the information is still not in the public domain. In addition, there are at least ten ”Free trade” agreements or ”Economic Partnership” agreements that include investment chapters or clauses relating to bilateral investment protection, and more than twenty more such agreements are currently being negotiated, according to the website of the Ministry of Commerce.

Bilateral investment treaties have been viewed with serious reservations by independent analysts for several reasons. They can have far-reaching and typically negative implications for host country governments and citizens, because of the sweeping protections afforded to investors at the cost of domestic socio-economic rights and environmental standards.

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Remembering Alice Amsden: Catching up or Falling Behind?

Mehdi Shafaeddin
This piece is dedicated to the memory of Professor Alice Amsden, who passed away last week.

Professor Amsden’s preoccupation was the analysis of the process by which some developing countries have managed to industrialize and accelerate their pace of economic development. The Republic of Korea, Taiwan Province of China and the so-called emerging economies (The Rest) were her main case studies. She was a visionary, and also believed in the need for tailor-made strategies for specific developing countries rather than one-size-fits-all economic policies. Nor did she believe in pure reliance on market forces as advocated by neo-liberals and reflected in an analysis of the question of “catch-up” in a recent issue of the Economist.

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Remembering Alice Amsden: Viva Alice!

Lyuba ZarskyAlice Amsden
World renowned development economist Alice Amsden passed away last week.

Alice Amsden was an intrepid thinker and I add my voice to the chorus of those inspired by her intellectual trailblazing. But I want to share a personal experience that sheds light on Alice’s inspiring character.

In the early 1980s, I was living in a fifth floor apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan with my partner, Peter Hayes. Alice lived down the hall. One morning, we were awakened by a loud commotion outside. I threw on my bath robe and peered out my door. I heard Alice yelling and saw that her door was open. I edged my way down the hall and in a second, a man flashed down the stairwell, clutching something under his arm. Alice screamed that she had been robbed and I should call the police—and then she tore down the stairwell in hot pursuit.

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Remembering Alice Amsden: an intellectual force

Calestous Juma, guest bloggerAlice Amsden
World renowned development economist Alice Amsden passed away this week.

It is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of Professor Alice Amsden. Alice was a true intellectual force and made remarkable contributions to our understanding of emerging economies.

She was widely recognized as one of the world’s leading visionaries. In 2003 she was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought from GDAE at Tufts University. The prize recognizes scholars whose work has helped to broaden economics to better understand urgent contemporary issues. She has made important contributions to our understanding of the role of building productive capabilities as a foundation for innovation.

A few of us who came to work with her closely also knew her as a person of irrepressible character who maintained very high standards. She challenged herself as hard as she challenged others. She pursued her research with remarkable vigor.

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Remembering Alice Amsden

Kevin P. GallagherAlice Amsden
World renowned development economist Alice Amsden passed away this week.

Alice Amsden seared through conventional economics and political science with her analyses of East Asian development in the later part of the 20th Century. She will long be remembered as one of the best development economists, and political economists, of her time.

Her book “The Rise of the Rest: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies” crystallized a lifetime of work that blended theory, quantitative analysis, and careful field work on “late development.” Other landmark books were “Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization” and “Beyond Late Development: Taiwan’s Industrial Upgrading.”

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Governments Agree on Voluntary Rules to Control Land Grabs

Sophia Murphy, guest blogger

Three years of negotiations on guidelines to govern the tenure of land, fisheries and forests (commonly referred to as the Voluntary Guidelines, or VG) came to a successful close on Friday, March 9 in Rome. Under the auspices of the newly reconfigured Committee on World Food Security (housed at the FAO with a secretariat shared among the FAO, the World Food Program and the International Fund for Agriculture and Development, or IFAD), the negotiations were contentious and important.

Ninety-six governments, accompanied by UN agencies, civil society organizations, farmer organizations and private sector representatives worked through three rounds of negotiations over as many years to come to agreement. The talks were chaired by the United States, whose negotiators earned the praise of the participants for their commitment to finding agreement across often significant divides. The conclusion of the VGs (see the FAO press release) marks an important step towards providing some protection for small-holders and communities around the world, who have found their productive assets (arable land, or fishing waters, or forests) under siege by a wave of investor interest from private companies and wealthy food importing countries.

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Trans-Pacific Partnership: Not a Great Deal for Asia

Kevin P. Gallagher

The American Prospect has a new special report titled “Pacific Illusions” that exposes the limits of the Obama Administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a proposed trade deal between the United States and eight other Pacific-rim countries.  The report features articles by Clyde Prestowitz, Lori Wallach, Jeff Faux, yours truly, and others.  This is a must read for anyone thinking about US trade policy and/or economic development.  Below are the first few paragraphs of my article that shows how the TPP will harm the development prospects for nations such as Malaysia and Vietnam. Read the full article at the link below, and be sure to check out the full report!

Not a Great Deal for Asia

The Trans-Pacific Partnership could end up hurting the broader economic interests of both the U.S. and smaller Asian nations.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is best understood as President Barack Obama’s extension of the Bush-era doctrine of “competitive liberalization.” Frustrated with pushback at the World Trade Organization by nations like China, Brazil, India, and South Africa, the United States seeks a coalition of the willing to import a commercial framework that rewards private firms at the expense of the common good. That policy regime is ailing in the U.S. and gets worse when exported.

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What do the new World Bank poverty statistics really tell us?

Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, guest bloggers

Now here is what sounds like a New York Times headline to celebrate: “Extreme Poverty in Developing World Is Down Despite the Recession, Report Says.”[i] That report would be a 6-page World Bank briefing note, the press release for which is titled: “New Estimates Reveal Drop in Extreme Poverty 2005-2010.” Echoes The Economist: “For the first time ever, the number of poor people is declining everywhere.”

If it were only that easy.  Let us dig into what the World Bank’s new briefing note really tells us and ask two questions: Do the statistics really show a fall in extreme poverty across the world?  And, what policies lie behind the changing poverty figures?

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The lessons of Fukushima, one year later

Martin Khor

It’s been a full year since Japan’s triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, and the reverberations are still being felt.

The tsunami of 11 March 2011 caused around 19,000 deaths (16,000 known dead, 3,000 missing), and 320,000 were made homeless. The nuclear disaster alone created 100,000 nuclear evacuees, a new tern created to describe those who had to leave their homes to escape radiation.

The lesson, only still partially learnt in Japan itself, and hardly learnt yet in other countries, is that natural disasters can come in different and unexpected forms, and governments must put aside considerable resources and facilities to prepare for and manage them.

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South Africa’s Carbon-Tax Debate Disappoints

Patrick Bond
(also available in Portuguese at INESC)

To be sure, it’s a difficult period for imposing new environmental taxes, given ongoing financial sector power over public policy. With the entry of European Union airlines into the region’s fast-collapsing Emissions Trading Scheme, a group of non-European countries led by the Chinese is revolting against paying higher air fares to and from Europe.

There are bad and good arguments about carbon taxation here. According to a China Daily report, “Europe’s compulsory charges are set to have great impact on China’s aviation industry, and more profound influences may be found in the export sector. China therefore strongly opposes the EU’s unilateral action, viewing the EU’s move as violating the United Nations Climate Change Framework Convention and related regulations of the International Air Transport Association.”

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