C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
In the desperate search for evidence that the global recession has bottomed out and the recovery has arrived, the story told by the long-term trend in unemployment levels and rates is being missed.
Early this year, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) had noted that the global unemployment rate was close to 6 per cent, implying that 197 million people were unemployed, even ignoring the 39 million who had dropped out of the workforce, discouraged by persistent failure in job search.
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Timothy Wise
It’s bad enough when bad policy causes unneeded suffering for those governed by that policy. It’s worse when the victims include those far from the policymaking. Such is the history of U.S. farm policy. Today, that history is being written in places like Guatemala, where the U.S. ethanol boom is contributing to hunger and landlessness among that country’s indigenous majority.
Thanks to the New York Times’ Elisabeth Rosenthal, we can see that history unfold in all its ugliness. She traveled to Guatemala for her feature, As Biofuel Demand Grows, So Do Guatemala’s Hunger Pangs. Her expose makes my own, which showed how U.S. corn ethanol has driven up corn import costs for poor countries, seem like just the proverbial outer layer of the onion.
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Leonce Ndikumana
Following the intense debate on the fiscal deficit during the U.S. presidential campaign, fiscal consolidation continues to dominate discussions in policy circles and academia. The large fiscal deficit in the U.S. and sovereign debt woes in the Eurozone are used by proponents of the “small government” mantra as a means to advance the belief that fiscal consolidation is the only way to bring the economy back to sustained growth and full employment. While the arguments are not new, the current circumstances of a global recession and a slow recovery in the U.S. make it somehow easier for proponents of this school of thought to fool the public into believing that tying the hands of the government is the only road to salvation.
African countries and developing countries in general know too well about the ravages of austerity programs; they certainly would not want to revisit the era of the 1980s that left permanent scars from fiscal retrenchment. While arguments for the alleged benefits of fiscal consolidation in terms of accelerated recovery and long-run growth are built on shaky empirical grounds in the case of developed countries,[1] they are even more tenuous for African countries. First is the chimera of “expansionary fiscal contraction” whereby fiscal consolidation is arguably supposed to boost growth through expansion of private spending driven by improved business confidence. In the case of developing countries, fiscal retrenchment typically involves substantial cuts in public expenditures including infrastructure, which worsens rather than improves the business environment by raising production costs. So, “expansionary fiscal contraction” isn’t, and can’t be, a developing country phenomenon.
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By Patrick Bond, Guest Blogger
Earlier this month, Time Magazine pronounced,
“Africa owes its takeoff to a variety of accelerators, nearly all of them external and occurring in the past 10 years:
• billions of dollars in aid, especially to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria;
• tens of billions of dollars in foreign-debt cancellations;
• a concurrent interest in Africa’s natural resources, led by China; and
• the rapid spread of mobile phones, from a few million in 2000 to more than 750 million today.”
The reality is very different, so let’s try this paragraph again. Actually, Africa owes its economic decline to a variety of accelerators, nearly all of them external and occurring in the past centuries during which slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism locked in the continent’s underdevelopment, but several of which – along with climate change – were amplified in recent years:
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We are economists who think that the economy should serve the people, the planet and the future.
Four million families have lost their homes to foreclosure in the Great Recession. Today another four million or more face the same fate. This devastation was triggered by unscrupulous financiers and exacerbated by government policies that put banker bonuses ahead of homeowner solvency.
Some blame families for foolishly pursuing the American Dream of homeownership. They think government assistance for banks is OK, but homeowners should be left to take free-market medicine.
Some claim that the solution for the housing crisis is to extend and pretend, to perpetuate make-believe values on bank balance sheets rather than to modify principal based on real housing prices. These policies may be a dream for bankers, but they’re a nightmare for homeowners.
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Anna Lekas-Miller, Guest Blogger
A woman walks up and down the dark hallway, holding a cheap transistor radio up to her ear, pressing it closer as it keeps cutting in and out.
“They’re saying that it could be anywhere between two and seven weeks before we get power,” she says, shaking her head. “So who even knows?”
I’m a volunteer with Occupy Sandy—a community relief effort that used the Occupy Wall Street network to coordinate hurricane relief in New York City’s hardest hit areas. I’mon the fifteenth floor of 711 Seagirt Boulevard, a twenty-five story housing complex in Far Rockaway—a neighborhood on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, New York that was one of the most devastated by Hurricane “Superstorm” Sandy. Though the building itself is secure, and suffered only a few inches of water during the storm itself, it has been without power and running water for almost two weeks. In a twenty-five story housing complex where many of the residents are elderly and disabled and the elevators no longer work, many of the residents have been trapped in their apartments since the storm.
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Esther Vivas, Guest Blogger
La Via Campesina
Via Campesina is the world’s foremost international movement of small farmers. It promotes the right of all peoples to food sovereignty. Via Campesina was established in 1993 at the dawn of the anti-globalization movement, and gradually became one of the major organizations in the critique of neoliberal globalization. Its ascent is an expression of peasant resistance to the collapse of the rural world caused by neoliberal policies, and the intensification of those policies as embodied in the World Trade Organization (Antentas and Vivas, 2009a).
Since its founding, Via Campesina has promoted a “female peasant” identity that is politicized, linked to land, food production and the defense of food sovereignty—built in opposition to the current agribusiness model (Desmarais, 2007). Via Campesina embodies a new kind of “peasant internationalism” (Bello, 2009), that can be viewed as a “peasant component” of the new international resistance presented by the anti-globalization movement (Antentas and Vivas, 2009).
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Esther Vivas, Guest Blogger
In the countries of the Global South women are the primary producers of food, the ones in charge of working the earth, maintaining seed stores, harvesting fruit, obtaining water and safeguarding the harvest. Between 60 to 80% of food production in the Global South is done by women (50% worldwide) (FAO, 1996). Women are the primary producers of basic grains such as rice, wheat, and corn which feed the most impoverished populations in the South. Despite their key role in agriculture and food however, women, together with their children, are the ones most affected by hunger.
For centuries, peasant women have been responsible for domestic chores, the care and feeding of their families, the cultivation, exchange and commercialization of household gardens; charged with reproduction, production and community—all the while occupying an often invisible domestic and social sphere. The main economic transactions in agriculture have traditionally been undertaken by men in markets, with the purchase and sale of animals, and the commercialization of large quantities of grains in the private and public sphere.
This division of roles, assigning women as the caretakers of the house as well as the health and education of their families, and granting men the “technical” management of land and machinery, maintains the assigned gender roles that have persisted in our societies through the centuries and into the present (Oceransky Losana, 2006).
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Jennifer Clapp
It turns out that the number of hungry people on the planet was not as high as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations originally thought it was. We were told in 2009 that the number of hungry people had surpassed 1 billion. But last week, the organization revised its numbers downward.
Armed with new and more accurate data and assessment methods, the new figures, published in the new State of Food Insecurity in the World report, show a slow decline in world hunger from around 1 billion hungry people in 1990-91 to around 867 million in 2007-09. And in 2010-12, the number inched a bit higher to 868 million. In other words, the food crisis of 2007-09 halted progress in fighting world hunger. The numbers also show that the vast majority of the people facing hunger live in developing countries.
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Sunita Narain
Growth is back on the agenda, says the Indian government. It is hoping that with pushy announcements foreign and Indian investment will miraculously start pouring in and infrastructure will be the name of the game once again. But this assumption ignores one crucial detail: currently, public-private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure are on the cusp of disaster. The country needs a different strategy to build public services infrastructure.
This is because in India, which has a large population of poor and relatively poor middle-class, public infrastructure has to be affordable to build and to run. But since we do not think about the nature of the asset we need to build, we make standard, capital-intensive infrastructure plans in the hope that someone will cough up funds to build. This then justifies the need for private investment. But in reality little private money comes. Worse, the private player is unable to run the public asset—be it water supply, public transport or a swanky airport—without substantial recurring funds. So the private sector’s interest is to make profit by building the infrastructure and then stay clear of the responsibility of making the system work. In this way PPP stands for public investment and private profit.
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