At the recently concluded UNCTAD XIII Conference in Doha, Qatar, a High-Level Roundtable on Debt Prevention and Management was held to discuss new Principles on Responsible Lending and Borrowing, which have been under discussion since 2009. The Principles are forward-looking and symmetrically cover issues on the lender and borrower sides; and they are comprehensive, in contrast to other existing ad hoc single-issue-focused initiatives; they take a soft-law approach with a view to build consensus. Most importantly, these Principles emphasize full information disclosure by lenders and borrowers as a means of enforcing accountability and discipline in lending and borrowing.
When it comes to food security and agriculture, the G20 seems to be all too willing to take the credit while passing the buck. It wants to set the agenda on world food security. But it has been reluctant to require the G20 governments themselves to coordinate regulatory changes to address high and rising food prices or put the kind of money needed into agricultural investment in the world’s poorest countries. Rather, it seems to be passing on responsibility for establishing rules and governance mechanisms to address food security onto others, while at the same time blocking others from discussing measures that might request changes to the G20’s policies.
This has been a bad stretch for advocates of financial reform – and therefore for the economy as a whole. One after the other, new financial regulations contained in the Dodd-Frank law are being gutted or delayed by regulators and Congress, while the bankers – escorted by a phalanx of paid economists, lawyers and lobbyists – are squealing “wee, wee, wee” all the way home.
Bankers and their lobbyists and economists help grease the skids not just with money – but with terms of “econ-speak” such as “cost-benefit analysis”, and most commonly, “liquidity”. Used and manipulated by the wrong hands, such boring and innocuous sounding concepts can turn dangerous, even fatal in the banker battle against safer financial regulation.
The new millennium has witnessed a staggering rise of the South. During 2003-08, the average growth of developing economies (DEs) exceeded that of advanced economies (AEs) by some 5 percentage points, compared to around one point in the 1980s and 1990s. The difference widened further during 2008-11 as most DEs proved resilient to the crisis while growth collapsed in AEs.
This growth divergence has widely been seen as the decoupling of the South from the North. However, the evidence does not show the desynchronisation of cycles between DEs and AEs, and deviations of economic activity from underlying trends continue to be highly correlated. The more significant question is whether there has been a durable shift in the trend growth of the South relative to the North. Such a view is widely held, including among policy makers in DEs. However, a closer look suggests that the growth surge in the South owes as much, if not more, to exceptional and unsustainable global economic conditions as it does to improvements in their own fundamentals. There is, consequently, no room for complacency in policy circles in DEs.
Last week Argentina’s president Cristina Kirchner nationalized 51% of the Spanish (majority) owned oil company Repsol-YPF. Madrid threatened reprisals but Kirchner reaffirmed her decision with nationalistic undertones. Many in Latin America saw the Argentinean resolve as an example of the region’s quest to recover control over its natural resources.
Progressive movements interpreted this act as proof that winds of change in Latin America are definitely moving away from the dark history of neoliberalism. But one question remains in the horizon: is Latin America returning to a form of extractivism?
Extractivism represents the time of enclaves, appalling social and labor conditions and the submission of central governments to the power of big international firms. It epitomizes the unfair and asymmetric integration of Latin America to the world economy at the end of the 19th century. The import substitution development strategy implemented between 1940 and 1978 was designed to escape from this trap. The debt crisis detonated in 1982 and the neoliberal policy package implemented in many countries in the region destroyed the industrial tissue built during the import substitution strategy.
Last week, U.S.-nominee Jim Kim was elected to be the next president of the World Bank group. Some well-known US economists and World Bank “insiders” criticized the choice – and supported Kim’s opponent Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala — because Kim is not an economist. From that criticism, one would surmise that the majority of World Bank presidents have indeed been economists.
But what really do we know about the background of the eleven men (yes, all men) who have held that post so far? So, expert pundits and readers alike, let’s see how well you do on the first annual World Bank President Trivia Game. Twelve men, so twelve questions:
The first category is education:
1. To repeat: Jim Kim does not hold a graduate degree in economics. How many of the eleven World Bank presidents do have graduate degrees (masters or doctorate) in economics?
ANSWER: None. While you would not know it from the criticisms of Kim, had Okonjo-Iweala won, she would have been the first. She holds a Ph.D. in regional economic development from the MIT.
Labor market coordination is the lynchpin of high-performance societies that maximize economic growth and equality, yet why does business ever cooperate? In a story replete with unintended consequences, The Political Construction of Business Interests recounts employers’ struggles to define their collective social identities at turning points in capitalist development, to understand why coordinated capitalism emerges in some countries but not others. The book tells of the construction of peak employers’ associations at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the efforts to sustain these associations at century’s end, and the impact of these institutions on employers’ preferences for the welfare state.