Archive

In spite of their differences and divergent interests, how can the two nations manage a bilateral relationship with far-reaching global implications towards peaceful coexistence forward?

The pandemic has caused havoc to the world’s health and economy, worsening inequality and disparities already disrupted by geopolitical rivalry, climate change, financialization and technology. Health, wealth and self are entangled in anger over rising inequality and temperatures.

In this interview, Dr. Folashadé Soulé and Dr. Camilla Toulmin speak with Pr. Mzukisi Qobo. Pr Qobo is the Head of the Wits School of Governance, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Stock-Price Volatility During the Pandemic

Stock-Price Volatility During the Pandemic

Princeton economics professor Markus Brunnermeier discusses his recently released book, The Resilient Society, which argues that in crisis-prone situations societal resilience is a crucial component for averting outright disaster and outlines how we might achieve that resilience. SHOW MORE

To strengthen the American semiconductor industry, Congress should condition additional funds on suspending stock buybacks

To strengthen the American semiconductor industry, Congress should condition additional funds on suspending stock buybacks

What does Biden’s economic policy mean for the future?

Climate change is a collective problem that has largely been addressed through market-based solutions focused on individual actors. Economics has been a driving factor behind this market approach. The push for continued and perpetual economic growth is seen by many as incompatible with climate action. What is the role of economics in addressing the climate crisis? Can existing economic paradigms deliver an equitable low-carbon future?

Ambitious climate policy needs a broad-based organizing effort to combat the fossil fuel industry. As the climate movement moves towards embracing racial and economic justice as part of climate advocacy, what strategies and policies are needed to build a multi-racial, multi-class coalition? How can movements build the power needed to ensure the low-carbon transition is just?

Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades about the severe global impact that rising temperatures will have on the environment, economies, and health outcomes, and ultimately humanity’s long-term survival. With disaster after disaster stacking up, the time for action is now.

“School choice” aimed to block the choice of equal, integrated education for Black families

Dr. Ming Lin complained about Covid-19 safety measures at his hospital. He got fired because a giant Wall Street firm called the shots.

The path to sustainable and just climate transition globally cannot happen without meaningful actions and cooperation between the US and China – the world’s largest economies and carbon emitters. What can we expect from US-China climate relations?

How do we pay for the vast transformation required? Who is responsible to whom, and how do we decide?

Can we realize the energy transition? What institutions might help us do so? What is the role of technology?

Please join us for networking before the start of each day.

Please join us for discussions at the end of each day.

In this interview, Dr. Folashadé Soulé and Dr. Camilla Toulmin discuss with Nanjala Nyabola, a writer and researcher based in Nairobi, Kenya. Nanjala’s work focuses on the intersection between technology, media, and society. She is currently the Director of Advox, the digital rights programme at Global Voices. Nanjala has held numerous research associate positions including with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), and other institutions, while also working as a research lead for several projects on human rights broadly and digital rights specifically around the world.

Has the financial system contributed to the climate crisis? Can it contribute to a green transition?

Please join us for networking before the start of each day.

Are existing institutions up to the task? Is the nation-state an obstacle, and if so how do we overcome it? What would alternatives look like, and how would we realize them?

What, if anything, can economics contribute to addressing the climate crisis? What role can or should markets and incentives play, and how?

Please join us for discussions at the end of each day.

Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades about the severe global impact that rising temperatures will have on the environment, economies, health outcomes, and ultimately humanity’s long-term survival. Yet little has been done.

Evidence from Survey Data of Inflation Forecasts

Geoff Mann, professor of geography at Simon Fraser University and co-author of the book, Climate Leviathan, discusses the authoritarian dangers ahead, as the world tried to cope with climate change, and how all institutions, including central banking, need to evolve so they address the problem adequately.

The economy is not gender neutral, but actually relies on gender imbalances to function and grow.

Going Down the Rabbit Hole at Jackson Hole

On deregulation and Covid masks, libertarians are loud. On female liberty, deafening silence.

“School choice” aimed to block the choice of equal, integrated education for Black families

Adam Tooze discusses his new book with Rob Johnson

Gisele Huff, education policy specialist and president of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity, along with john a. powell, director of UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, talk about the motivations and process behind the soon-to-be-released report, “Convening on Automation, Opportunity, and Belonging: Vision and Foundations for a Better Society.”

Economics has many flaws, yet few are as broadly oppressive as its illusions about gender.

In Europe, imbalances in the structure of the automotive and a lack of industrial policies risk creating a deadly cocktail for millions of European workers just as the auto sector is undergoing decisive changes.

In Europe, imbalances in the structure of the automotive and a lack of industrial policies risk creating a deadly cocktail for millions of European workers just as the auto sector is undergoing decisive changes.

Isabella Weber, assistant professor of economics at UMass Amherst, discusses her new book on how China managed its transition from central planning to markets

If we save education, can we save humanity?

The Locus and Focus of Speculation

“Just learn to live with it” policies subject children to an experiment with a systemic disease that does serious and lasting damage, warns former NASA and DARPA technologist

The Taliban was strategic in its use of violence, exercising restraint to influence military assessments of their capabilities in order to encourage more rapid withdrawals.

MIT economic historian Peter Temin discusses parts of his forthcoming book, focusing on the history of mass incarceration of uneducated Blacks and how it has created a permanent class of poor Black Americans

Andre Perry, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the book, Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Properties in America’s Black Cities, discusses the ongoing problem of how real estate dynamics continue to maintain racial injustice in cities across United States, and how we need a “reparative culture” to address the problem.

The 4th Law, Economics & Policy Conference (LEPC) is a virtual, multi-capsule conference series that aims to bring together legal, economic and public policy thinkers to consider a variety of real world issues in India in a holistic manner.

Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, talks about the many ways in which the US economic system has become rigged to favor the richest.

If libertarians wish to maintain their self-centered fixation on their own freedoms without considering others, let them do so — in indefinite quarantine from the rest of us.

Lori Wallach, of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, and Jayati Ghosh, economics professor at UMass Amherst, discuss how first world countries are protecting pharma companies’ exorbitant profits, at the expense of vaccinating people living in the Global South and thereby also endangering everyone in the world.

The 4th UNCTAD YSI Summer School celebrates the approach and legacy of UNCTAD’s annual Trade and Development Report (TDR). The school will bring together UNCTAD experts, academics, diplomats, and young scholars from across the globe for lively and stimulating intellectual debates.

The work of feminist thinkers helps illuminate why billionaires seek to solve problems on Earth by blasting into space.

In 2021, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) celebrates 20 years of contributing research and expert analysis to global policy making.

Occasionally, financial speculation fastens onto transformational technologies that have the potential to create a genuinely new economy.

Getting the whole spectrum of governments, academia and civil society to track “natural capital” would help create shared efforts toward solving shared problems like the climate crisis.

The world-renowned development economist Jeffrey Sachs outlined a new framework for US-China relations in conversation with INET President Rob Johnson

As a pandemic continues to expose weaknesses in our human systems and institutions, psychiatrist and author Iain McGilchrist’s proposition that a battle in our heads is impacting the direction of our future is worth revisiting.

A collection of INET analysis of the Chinese economy and US-China relations

Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) allow foreign capitalists to run roughshod over the rights of Ecuadorians

In the era of COVID and digital movements, strikes look radically different from traditional labor strikes

The increase in populism that import competition causes has its roots in import competition’s adverse effects on local labor markets

Stock buybacks come at the cost of technological innovation

Is China really the enemy, or are we just creating self-fulfilling prophecies?

Market fetishists may not know it yet, but it’s over.

Where are the US and Europe now and where could they be going?

A global carbon tax alone will not be enough to significantly reduce CO2 emissions

Contrary to rhetoric from Democrats and Republicans, the U.S. has an economic interest in trade and peace with China

Inflation? Expanding digital currencies? What’s next in this brave new world?

Dr Kandeh Yumkella is a development economist, founder and CEO of The Energy Nexus Network (TENN), a regional hub for sustainable energy solutions and serves as a Member of Parliament in Sierra Leone. Previously Dr Yumkella served as Under-Secretary-General and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All and founding chief executive officer for the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) Initiative (2013–2015). He also served as Director-General of the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO, 2005–2013), mobilising global consensus for SDG7 and 9. He is a member of the High-Level Group of the Africa-Europe Foundation, co-chair of the Africa Europe Foundation Strategy Group on Energy, and member of various international advisory bodies, boards, and commissions.

Economist Darrick Hamilton, co-author of a new report on wealth across racial and ethnic groups in Tulsa, Oklahoma, explores the legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre with the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Lynn Parramore.

“The most recent study, using sophisticated AI techniques, dispels “notions that anyone’s opinion about public policy outside of the top 10 percent of affluent Americans independently helps to explain policy.” Thomas Ferguson, the leading academic scholar of the power of the “tools and tyrants” of government, concludes: “Knowing the policy area, the preferences of the top 10 percent, and the views of a handful of interest groups suffice to explain policy changes with impressive accuracy.” — Jared Rodriguez, Truthout

New economic engagements with India.

You have the power to reframe and reimagine the 21st century.

An excerpt from the just released book, The Outlier, by Kai Bird

“Moreover, too little government spending can increase company bankruptcies and lead to less investment in research and development, hurting the supply side of our economies — potentially exacerbating inflationary pressures. The EU has gone through a decade of demand stagnation, performing well below its productive potential. Inflationary forces of the 1970s are no longer intact, not least because of declining labour bargaining power, changing demographics, high inequality and private debt overhang. Without concerted fiscal expansion to scale-up investment and protect the vulnerable, aggregate demand will remain low and standards of living will stagnate. Instead of fetishising fiscal discipline, we should prioritise more important social, economic and environmental outcomes — like creating well-paid green jobs, lifting millions out of poverty and implementing green infrastructure projects.” — From Frank van Lerven and others, Financial Times

“Well, one place to look always is: “Where’s the money? Who funds Congress?” Actually, there’s a very fine, careful study of this by the leading scholar who deals with funding issues and politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study in which they investigated a simple question: “What’s the correlation over many years between campaign funding and electability to Congress?” The correlation is almost a straight line. That’s the kind of close correlation that you rarely get in the social sciences: greater the funding, higher the electability.” — Noam Chomsky in an interview with Jacobin

What That Means For Biden’s Inflation Policy Trilemma

How do we move fiscal policy from part of the problem to part of the solution?

Is Victorian writer Walter Bagehot, whose adage “lending freely against good collateral at a penalty rate” has been gospel for central bankers, still relevant in a post-Great Financial Crisis world?

“Overcoming the COVID-19 crisis and ensuring a rapid and equitable economic recovery are only two of the challenges we must meet in 2021. This year will also be a crucial one for achieving the goal of net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by mid-century.” — Project Syndicate

Is Victorian writer Walter Bagehot, whose adage “lending freely against good collateral at a penalty rate” has been gospel for central bankers, still relevant in a post-Great Financial Crisis world?

“Last year, Weil and his former top adviser, Tanya Goldman, spoke with Law360 about their “concentric circles” model, laid out in a recent working paper published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. They propose a three-tiered system that starts with a set of core rights linked to all types of work, like basic protections against unsafe conditions, discrimination and harassment, and nonpayment. The second tier of rights includes things like collective bargaining, and access to workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance, which businesses would have to provide unless they could affirmatively prove that their workers aren’t employees. The outermost tier of rights seeks to make benefits portable for workers facing uncertainty.” — Mike LaSusa, Law 360

“What is the real meaning of the return of the state in a world that after the pandemic starts a boom in the technology sector with the advantages and risks that this entails? The response of the Nobel laureate in economics Michael Spence during the discussion with Robert Johnson, president of Inet (Institute for New Economic Thinking) was clear: “I believe that the return of the Statto means many things. The state is very important for social protection, to remedy the failures of the market. There will be changes in the models of globalization but people think about the state and not about globalization. And the state must be able to respond to citizens’ expectations.” And in the face of what Johnson called “growing political despair” ( even as Biden has made progress in restoring confidence in citizens after the inequalities caused by the pandemic ), a new political class is needed.” -L’Adigetto

The governance of technology is a new challenge. The Recovery Plans is encouraging the digital transformation of our economies. An acceleration of technological change is bound to deeply affect labor markets and income distribution. While labor-market adaptation is likely to stave off permanent high unemployment, it cannot be counted on to prevent a sharp rise in inequality.

The world won’t emerge from the pandemic until the pandemic is controlled everywhere, and this is a special concern because of the new mutations that are likely to arise where the disease is running its course. So too, the world won’t have a robust economic recovery until at least most of the world is on the course to prosperity. Global growth is far more muted now than then, and inward-looking policies in some of the nations where growth has been restored have resulted in an increase in their trade surplus, attenuating the global impact of their recovery.

Our world is full of fault lines—growing inequality in income and opportunity; systemic racism; health and economic crises from a global pandemic; mistrust of experts; the existential threat of climate change; deep threats to employment in a digital economy with robotics on the rise. These fundamental problems and others like them stem from a common crisis in values.

Melissa Hathaway joined NPR to discuss cybersecurity and the growing threat of ransomware attacks.

“How talented is the right? Maybe not so much. The late Yale political scientist Charles Lindblom, author of the 1977 book Politics and Markets (and onetime American Political Science Association president), would have told Giridharadas that in a capitalist economy, business elites enjoy a “privileged” position. This position does not always align with party, but it alters the field of play. Lindblom’s position is backed by others. Thomas Ferguson wrote about the investment theory of politics in 1990s. In the past decade, Ben Page of Northwestern has covered similar ground.” — Steve Dubb, Nonprofit Quarterly

“It’s interesting he [Josephus Daniels] may not have been the most die-hard racist, but he just saw that racism is how you win elections. I think we see echoes of that today. I think it’s also notable to recall that this is the only successful insurrection on U.S soil in U.S history. People started finding out a little bit about it when the capital siege occurred because people started asking, “has an insurrection ever happened?” Actually the answer is yes, and it would be Wilmington. It’s the only time this has ever happened to a municipal government and it was the state that allowed this to happen, allowed these militias to run amok. It was the state that was really responsible at the end of the day for this violence. And there have never been any reparations of any kind even though there are people living in Wilmington today who can who can say, “my ancestor owned this plot of land that was taken.” They’ve never had any reparations. If it was a white person that could prove that, I think we would be talking about justice. But it mirrors the Tulsa situation, it was the success of black people that was the problem. Not this idea of inferiority which had been the racial mythology. it was actually the fact that black people had persevered and were very successful even in the face of all of this oppression.” ….It’s just happened time and time again in Wilmington, Tulsa, Detroit, elsewhere, that the American dream has just been incredibly elusive for black Americans through absolutely no fault of their own. What I think is pretty clearly structural racism.”— Lynn Parramore

Canadian economist Mario Seccareccia, recipient of this year’s John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics, says it’s time to reconsider the idea of full employment. He spoke to Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking about why 2021 offers a rare opportunity to rebalance the economy in favor of Main Street.

Watch INET at the Trento Economics Festival online

Why do patriarchal systems survive? What is missing in how economics relates to the concepts of identity and power?

By Stefano Sannino Secretary-General, European External Action Service (EEAS), Jutta Urpilainen EU Commissioner for International Partnerships, European Commission, Rohinton P. Medhora President, The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Andrew Michael Spence Nobel Laureate of Economics, Co-Chair, Commission on Global Economic Transformation, Jayati Ghosh Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Andrea Renda (moderator) Senior Research Fellow, Head of GRID Unit, CEPS

How do we break free of the cycle of restrictive thinking which has plagued economics, and the world?

“Now it’s maybe particularly an Indian phenomenon because of the strong lockdown we had last year, but I think across the world what we’re seeing in fact is that people are trapped in poverty because of the lack of employment opportunities, lack of income support, they’re increase in indebtedness, and their earnings remain depressed. So in that sense the news is extremely bad. Also, we’re seeing huge dislocations in the labor market itself. People who finally came into the formal labor force and had some sort of formal protections are now becoming informalized or worse as is the case with women in India, just leaving the labor force. When one asks for example social cohesion what can one say –it is devastating for any kind of view of an inclusive growth process where we’re trying to encourage many people into gainful employment and to actually see their welfare rise. Of course, financial vulnerabilities have risen many fold as a result of that. In addition, one ought to underline that this thing isn’t going away. Right now in India we’re in the second wave which is quite devastating. There are the very simple and awful thoughts of just basic mortality. What it’s going to do to you know many people’s indebtedness, their ability to earn incomes because this is not limited in India for example only to let’s say the relatively elderly but across the population distribution. I think we’re just at the beginning of trying to of seeing what it will do for social cohesion or destruction more likely. I think we had a mild wave last year and what we’re going to see this year as a result… we have yet to see but it will be bad.” — Arjun Jayadev

“Ransomware demands have increased exponentially in the last six months, according to Melissa Hathaway, president of Hathaway Global Strategies and a former cybersecurity adviser to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The average ransom demand is now between $50 million and $70 million, Hathaway said. While those demands are often negotiated down, she said companies are frequently paying ransoms in the tens of millions of dollars, in part because cyber insurance policies cover some or all of the cost. She estimated that the average payment is between $10 million and $15 million.” — Kartikay Mehrotra and William Turton, Bloomberg

“This survey gives a voice to US health care workers who have been on the frontlines of COVID-19,” David Michaels, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington University and former administrator of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said. “Health care workers have valuable first-hand knowledge about this pandemic and this report offers recommendations that could help keep the U.S. on a steady course now and in the future.” …. Michaels and Melissa Perry, a professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, provided guidance in producing the report. The McElhattan Foundation and the Institute for New Economic Thinking provided financial support for the survey and the report.” — George Washington University