Jayati Ghosh warns against historically disastrous approaches to the sovereign-debt crisis hitting low- and middle-income countries.

The crisis in low, middle-income nations is driven by speculation, falling purchasing power and depreciating currencies.

Because the changes needed to achieve sustainable well-being for everyone are so big, they require determined social movements with wide participation. But while history shows that inertia and defeatism can become self-fulfilling, it also shows that governments ultimately have to respond to popular pressure–or be replaced by it.

Financial markets in the so-called ‘emerging economies’ are in turmoil. At the end of May 2022, the Financial Times reported that the return delivered by emerging market (EM) sovereign bonds was around minus 15 per cent for 2022, the worst since 1994.

The global food crisis has now grown to such proportions that everyone is talking about it (even though world leaders are doing relatively little about it).

Jayati Ghosh finds in a UN Women report a blueprint for an economy which serves the public—rather than the other way around.

Financial globalization was supposed to spur development. Instead, it transfers money to the global North and exacerbates existing inequalities.

On July 6, 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally imposed a 25 per cent tariff on Chinese imports of around $34 billion, and further tariffs in 2018 and 2019—claiming that trade between U.S. and China had been unfairly skewed in China’s favour and needed to be rebalanced.

Agriculture—especially industrial agriculture requiring chemical inputs—is cause and victim of these changes. Cultivation patterns such as mono-cropping, with heavy reliance on groundwater and chemical inputs, have reduced the food sovereignty of poor countries and generated growing environmental problems.

Capitalism is supposed to be all about economic growth, through the dynamism that is created by competition. This growth is meant to be driven by investment (or accumulation) which, in turn, is used to justify the shares of national income that are delivered to private profits, to the owners of capital.

The perfect storm of COVID-19 and climate change, and the resulting economic damage, will most likely trigger much more social and political instability. Although substantially increased international cooperation can still avert this nightmarish scenario, the current state of global politics provides few grounds for optimism.

Samir Amin’s life and work left behind many important legacies, which can continue to enrich us if only we recognise them adequately. He brought an indefatigable ‘optimism of the will’ to complex processes of political, social and economic change, involving an energy that was not deterred at all by the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ that his razor-sharp mind could generate.

Vaccine grabs, the refusal to relax patents to enable mass production, and the use of vaccines for diplomacy run the risk that poorer nations may not be protected against Covid-19 quickly enough. This will prolong the pandemic, even for the richer nations.

The world has been preoccupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, and this has also affected policymakers everywhere. There is much more recognition today of the terrible effects of underfunding public health over decades and how this affects the resilience of economies and societies.

The evidence clearly is that the Covid-crisis has upended the fiscal conservatism that has been the hallmark of the neoliberal era since the 1980s.

China’s use of yuan-denominated central bank swaps, while enhancing its influence, is a source of support for developing countries in an unequal international order.

These hopes may not last long. The announcement has sent governments scrambling to lay claim to vaccine doses, apparently realizing a bleak prediction: wealthy countries and individuals will monopolize early doses of any effective vaccine.

Recently, mainstream economics has been forced to acknowledge some of the explicit and implicit forms of discrimination and bias that are rampant in the discipline, thanks in particular to some brave interventions by some women economists.

The past year has brought into sharp relief the significant differences between China and the rest of the world.

The NSSO’s time use survey reveals striking facts about how men and women in India spend their time very differently, with women hugely burdened by unpaid work