A fresh mandate has been given to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to continue the scope of its present activities as well as to take on some new issues in the next four years.
This was the main result of UNCTAD’s ministerial conference (known as UNCTAD XIII) that ended in Doha, Qatar, on Thursday.
It came after a huge battle between developing and developed countries that went on for several months, first in Geneva (where the UN organisation is located) and then in Doha.
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.
Robin Broad, guest blogger
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.
Cathie Jo Martin and Duane Swank, guest bloggers
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.
Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer
In our blog in December we provide a quick critique of the ‘fiscal compact’ for the Economic and Monetary Union (‘euro area’) (now to be embodied in the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance). The fiscal compact is more rigorous in terms of the constraints on budget deficits of the member states in relation to those that were contained in the Stability and Growth Pact and the requirement for a ‘structural balanced budget’. The proposed Treaty (signed by all the European Union members with the exception of the UK and the Czech Republic, and currently under a process of ratification by national parliaments) makes no mention of the role of the ‘independent’ European Central Bank.
On 21 April, the UNCTAD ministerial conference known as UNCTAD XIII begins in Doha. It is shaping up as an important milestone to reaffirm – or not – the mandate given to UNCTAD to work on key global economic issues, including finance and macro-economic policy.
In fact, UNCTAD enjoys that mandate already, given its role in the UN system to organize an integrated perspective on trade, finance and economic issues.
However, some developed countries have attempted to dilute the specific issues that the UNCTAD secretariat has highlighted in recent years, especially in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis.
Rainer Kattel and Ringa Raudla, guest bloggers
European crisis resolution seems to rest on one hope: austerity can bring growth. History and most of economic theory seems to suggest that this is not possible. The Baltics peg to differ. Or so it seems. During the 2008-2010 crisis the Baltic economies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania experienced peak-to-trough reductions in GDP as high as 20%, 25% and 17% respectively. Governments decided to stick to currency pegs and opt for austerity and internal devaluation by cutting government expenditure in 2009 around 8-9% and additional 3-4% (of GDP) in 2010. By 2011, all Baltic economies were growing again, real GDP growth, driven by rapid recovery in exports, topping European charts with 7.6% (Estonia), 5.5% (Latvia) and 5.9% (Lithuania). Based on our forthcoming paper, “The Baltic States and the Crisis of 2008-2010”, we discuss in what follows whether in fact the Baltic internal devaluation worked and, more importantly, whether it can be replicated anywhere else, Europe or elsewhere. All data comes from our paper, where the reader can also find detailed references.
Triple Crisis blogger Kevin Gallagher was recently interviewed by CNN on the recent rise in investment by Chinese development banks in the Caribbean and Latin America.