In June, 1,200 scholars and activists from around the world gathered in Norway for a historic convergence of two movements: degrowth and ecological economics. During the closing plenary session, I listened to three speakers, two of whom鈥擪ate Raworth and Max Ajl鈥攔epresented radically different approaches to our current crises. Though Raworth and Ajl engaged in respectful dialogue, the tension in the room became almost palpable when Raworth’s polished slides on doughnut economics gave way to Ajl’s anti-imperialist critique: Can an apolitical reform tool truly coexist with the Global South’s demand for systemic revolution?
the Chilean government confirmed a report published earlier that morning: Chinese companies BYD and Yongqing Technology (Tsingshan Group) had abandoned their planned lithium cathode production facilities in Chile. This announcement dealt a significant blow to the ambitions of a country with a longstanding mining tradition, now striving to build industrial capabilities and develop value-added products from its mineral resources amid the global energy transition. However, just one day later, the Chinese embassy in Chile both the initial report and the Chilean government’s confirmation. After consultations with both companies, the embassy clarified that neither had officially withdrawn their investment plans. Instead, they reaffirmed ongoing interest in maintaining dialogue with Chilean authorities. The embassy further emphasized Chile’s continuing attractiveness to Chinese businesses, highlighting the numerous firms eager to participate in the country鈥檚 National Lithium Strategy. the Chinese embassy鈥檚 statement鈥攊ssued amidst escalating trade tensions and shifts in the international order鈥攕uggests this chapter is far from concluded.
This episode highlights the complexity and uncertainty confronting peripheral economies attempting to industrialize by leveraging their comparative advantages amidst the so-called energy transition and broader geopolitical tensions marked by trade wars. While significant global attention remains focused on the socio-environmental impacts of critical mineral extraction, less consideration has been given to examining how peripheral economies鈥攃ountries heavily reliant on natural resource extraction鈥攁re strategically navigating or capitalizing on this 鈥渃ritical minerals moment鈥� in relation to their own ambitions to industrialize.
The effectiveness of private equity has been a subject of ongoing debate in countries of the Global North. There is substantial evidence highlighting the extractive practices associated with private equity operations across Western nations. Examples include the decline of the and the financial instability of local councils in the UK, particularly in the provision of . Similarly, in the United States, private equity has been linked to the attrition of an already fragile . In ., its influence has contributed to the deterioration of care homes, raising significant concerns about its broader social and economic impact.
In a recent blog, Michael Roberts characterized private equity as 鈥溾��, encapsulating the widely recognized critique that private equity firms function through a rentier model. These firms are frequently associated with practices such as asset stripping, worker lay-offs, and opting for excess leverage that increases the debt burdens of their acquisitions, all while failing to provide compelling evidence of value creation. This perspective aligns closely with earlier criticisms of private equity. During the 2000s, private equity operations were similarly likened to a swarm of , reflecting widespread disapproval of their extractive and often detrimental economic practices.
In summary, such analogies emphasize the aftermath of private equity operations, leaving behind 鈥渃arcasses and barren landscapes.鈥� Nevertheless, the evidence of a hollowed-out socio-economic landscape in the Global North has not deterred the international expansion of private equity into countries of the Global South. On the contrary, have emerged in tandem with the globalization of Western private equity. In so-called 鈥渆merging markets,鈥� this expansion manifests in various forms, including an enthusiasm for deploying 鈥渕oral money鈥� through international development initiatives.
This article examines the role of private equity in Global South countries, focusing on three key characteristics: the escalation of indebtedness, the weakening of public markets, and the public subsidy function of development finance in facilitating private equity investments.
The International Trade Union Confederation鈥檚 (ITUC) was released on 2 June. The report presents a sobering picture of escalating violations of workers鈥� rights globally. Based on data from 151 countries, the Index reports that 87% of countries violated the right to strike, 80% restricted collective bargaining, and over 70% impeded union registration or denied access to justice. These trends, the report argues, reflect a 鈥渃oup against democracy鈥濃�攁n ongoing assault on core labour rights driven by repressive governments, emboldened corporations, and a broader authoritarian and conflict-ridden global capitalism.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region once again emerges as the most repressive in the Index (with an overall score of 4.68; a score of 5 indicates no guarantee of rights), with all countries in the region found to have violated fundamental rights to organise and collectively bargain, as well as registration of unions. The right to strike was suppressed in 95% of countries in the region, while over half of MENA states arbitrarily arrested or detained workers (p.28). The list of the ten worst countries for working people is composed mainly of Global South countries, with MENA cases including Egypt, Tunisia, and T眉rkiye. Over the past few years, my research has focused on the political economy and labour relations of these three countries[i], and below I briefly discuss them with insights drawn from the ITUC report.
However, before turning to these cases, it is important to highlight some potential limitations or problems in the ITUC report. While its findings are grounded in substantial and credible documentation, the non-contextualised regional framing of the Global Rights Index risks reproducing a familiar issue regarding the Middle East: the tendency to isolate MENA as uniquely authoritarian or culturally predisposed to repression. By highlighting MENA as the 鈥渨orst region鈥� without sufficiently situating its labour regimes within broader historical and structural dynamics, the Index could be seen to implicitly (albeit unintentionally) reinforce exceptionalist interpretations that have long shaped conventional understandings of the region.
When considering the Global South in general, and the MENA region in particular, we must not overlook the dynamics inherent to uneven capitalist development, such as persistent global and regional inequalities, the imperatives of cheap labour in hierarchical global production networks, IFI conditionalities, and the long-term consequences of war, occupation, and imperialist intervention. In countries like Egypt and Tunisia, and historically in Turkey, for example, the role of the IMF and World Bank in shaping labour markets through austerity, privatisation, and deregulation has been central to the weakening of collective rights. The region is also the most unequal in the world by income and wealth, according to the 鈥攁 fact that reinforces the political utility of repressing labour as a force of potential redistribution and mobilisation.
While specific political regimes certainly shape labour practices, and domestic political agency is not insignificant, these conditions should not be viewed as 鈥榓nomalies鈥� within an otherwise democratic capitalism. That countries like the United States and the United Kingdom (major centres of 鈥榣iberal democratic capitalism鈥�) are both rated as systematically violating workers鈥� rights (with a score of 4, p.21) should caution against any simplistic division between 鈥渁uthoritarian鈥� and 鈥渄emocratic鈥� regimes under capitalism. Rather, what we are witnessing is a global pattern of labour repression under crisis-ridden global capitalism.
It has been more than a century since Ambedkar鈥檚 second disquisition in the discipline of economics was published; The problem of the rupee: its origin and its solution was published in the year 1923. Ambedkar was awarded a Doctor of Science (D. Sc) upon completion of the aforementioned dissertation from the London School of Economics. Later, during the same year, it was published as a book (Jadhav 2015, p. 39).
This essay is fundamentally a tribute to The problem of the rupee; it aims to serve as a primer by discussing the theoretical gravitas and intellectual depth that Ambedkar鈥檚 second disquisition entails. While it is well-recognized that Ambedkar was trained in economics鈥攈olding two doctoral degrees[1]鈥攁nd made significant contributions to law and politics, this essay sheds light upon a few interactions with different economists and economic conditions that Ambedkar鈥檚The problem of the rupee engages with and subsequently invites for more extensive and nuanced engagement with the monograph.
Earlier, there have been multiple scholarly contributions that engaged with The problem of the rupee. However, they present only the overarching arguments i.e., the arguments are void of the details that explain the intellectual brilliance that is present in Ambedkar (1923). For instance, Jadhav claims that, after evaluating the Indian monetary system and operations, Ambedkar was in favour of a gold-standard rather than a gold-exchange standard (1991, p. 980). In a rudimentary sense, what gold standard and a gold-exchange standard mean is that the former indicates a monetary practice where gold is the direct form of currency that would be available for circulation. On the other hand, the latter i.e., the gold exchange standard is a condition where gold would not be a medium of exchange, but another form of currency would be the medium of exchange as gold would be held for reserve exchanges.
The economist Alice Amsden鈥檚 work unmasked the dirty secret underlying capitalist development: it relied on states breaking all the rules of the free market. But her work also showed that industrialization required corporate discipline, not welfare.
For American defenders of economic liberalism and free markets, China鈥檚 rise has been deeply disorientating. Unmoved by concerns about the market distorting effects of picking winners, the Communist Party of China has engaged in a focused campaign of industrial policy, using the state to discipline firms that have gone on to become globally competitive.
For the economist Alice Amsden, who came to prominence in the late 1980s for her writing on global development and died in 2012, the success of China would not have come as a surprise. Amsden began her career as powerful development institutions such as the World Bank were touting deregulation and privatization as solutions to global poverty. But the experience of the postwar years, in which South Korea 鈥� a recurring object of study for Amsden 鈥� used industrial policy to drag itself into middle income status, was a refutation of the orthodoxies rehearsed at Davos and in the International Monetary Fund.
The embrace of state subsidies to firms, tariffs, and large-scale infrastructure spending under Joe Biden and Donald Trump鈥檚 presidencies is partly a concession to the kind of developmentalist thinking advocated by Amsden. However, Amsden, a fellow traveler, if not devotee, to Marxism offered a more ambivalent assessment of the records of late industrializing nations like South Korea and China than defenders of Biden/Trumponomics are perhaps willing to countenance. For her, the repression of labor was as important to the success of these nations as large-scale economic coordination.
Defenders of capitalism argue that cooperation is undermined by individuals鈥� tendency to take more from society than they contribute. The economist Elinor Ostrom refuted this idea, but without identifying capitalism as the real cause of exploitation.
Socialist arguments that cooperation and collective action represent the basis of a better society are often dismissed by supporters of capitalism. 鈥淗uman nature,鈥� so the argument goes, is inherently self-seeking.
The so-called 鈥渇ree-rider problem鈥� purports to prove that large-scale cooperation is unsustainable because individuals seek to benefit from the collective action of others while minimizing their own contribution. This tendency is, the argument goes, a barrier to collective solutions to social problems.
Rather than cooperate, individuals should allow market forces to dictate how they decide to allocate their time and resources. Such arguments are applied by supporters of capitalism to explain why rational collective resource management and attempts to tackle climate breakdown are unlikely to succeed without the aid of market forces.
Since capitalism emerged as the world鈥檚 dominant economic system, its defenders have argued that private property rights and the pricing of natural resources are the only way to collectively manage our social goods.
The economist Elinor Ostrom provided a sharp critique of such notions from within the framework of mainstream economics. She demonstrated that cooperative management of natural resources can preserve rather than degrade them, and that trust between strangers can be established, expanded, and become the basis of collaborative ways of managing what she described as 鈥渃ommon-pool resources.鈥�
Within the field of sustainable development studies, her work became highly influential and helped to bring the notion of 鈥渢he commons鈥� to a broader audience. However, outside of academia, she remains largely unknown 鈥� a glaring oversight in a world in which education, water, and even land are increasingly run and managed for and by private companies.
The recent paper by Gast贸n Nievas and Thomas Piketty, has gained substantial praise as well as criticism in a short period of time. Their empirical endeavor is impressive: the authors compiled and published a large dataset of balance of payments, including traded goods, services, direct transfers, and income from foreign labor and capital assets. This is a gruelling task in itself, and the dataset will certainly provide the foundations for many fruitful studies. For many academic economists, Nievas and Piketty鈥檚 own interpretation of the data constitutes one such great contribution for it puts forward, as the title of their paper suggests, that modern inequalities across regions and countries have their roots in colonial extraction and unequal exchange characterizing international trade until today.
We on the other hand argue that the paper falls behind the state of perception of international inequalities in the Marxist tradition, dependency and structural economics literature. It (1) grasps global inequality as the outcome of a collection of distortions of the capitalist market mechanism rather than as an intrinsic feature of the latter; (2) consequently, proposes structural reforms to alter the power asymmetries in international trade, without an appropriate model of those power relations and why they exist in the first place; (3) lacks an adequate theory of production, value and price to understand the exchange relations at stake; and (4) artificially separates the term unequal exchange from the existing literature on trade inequalities, value transfers, and drain of wealth.
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