The Agrarian Crisis in Punjab and the Making of the Anti-Farm Law Protests

The protests in Punjab are happening at a time when the agrarian economy is under stress. With increasing uncertainty, previously antagonistic groups across classes, castes & gender are coming closer, building a broader base for the agitation & beyond.

Punjab鈥檚 farmers have been unrelenting in their opposition to  passed in September. Their sustained and creative opposition continues to make headlines. The central government too remains adamant and increasingly belligerent about sustaining the laws in their current form. The political pressure of the farmers has led the Punjab government, in a symbolic gesture, to pass  rejecting the centre鈥檚 farm laws. The past weeks have witnessed bitter stand-offs: farmers blocking rail tracks, the railways suspending services to Punjab , and . A march of thousands of farmers to Delhi earlier this week to register their opposition to these laws is faced police barricades, water cannons, and tear gas shells.

In the face of the unpopularity of the farm laws, the central government has found refuge in different kinds of arguments in favour of the reforms. It has sought to discredit the protests by arguing that the agitation is driven by , and that small and marginal farmers are  with these laws. The opposition to the new laws is portrayed as coming from large, prosperous, and politically powerful farmers, who dominate Punjab鈥檚 farmers unions and who benefited the most from the old system.

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Does India鈥檚 Gender Budget Need a Rethink?

India was a pioneering country when it as part of its annual Financial Year Budget. Gender Budgeting (GB) highlights the inherently different experiences in receiving financial and welfare support from the state due to their differing needs, priorities and access and serves to ameliorate the barriers to economic inclusion faced by women through a plethora of state financing. 

India鈥檚 Gender Budget Statement (GBS) has been released in. Each ministry highlights allocations that are – women specific allocations where 100% of the budget for a specific scheme is assigned to women and a 鈥榩ro-women鈥檚鈥 allocation, where at least 30% of the budget for a specific scheme has been assigned to women to enhance affirmative action.

Figure 1: Proportion of women鈥檚 allocation in India鈥檚 Gender Budget

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Return of the Bond Villains

In 1825 a Javanese prince named Diponegoro touched off a five-year, ultimately unsuccessful, war of resistance against the Dutch colonial government. As detailed by Peter Carey in , one of the causes was a land-rent system imposed by the Dutch on the Javanese sultanate of Yogyakarta. Under this system, landowners were encouraged to rent their estates directly to European plantation owners for the production of cash crops. This had a disruptive effect on the local economy and the Governor-General ordered it halted. But there was a catch. As the land-rent system was unwound, the Javanese landowners were forced to buy out the plantation owners in order to get control of their land back.

Many had already used the rents to buy imported luxury goods, and they fell into debt paying out large and often inflated sums to the plantation owners. The sultan was expected to back-stop these debts using payments he received from the Dutch for granting them the right to collect revenue on the kingdom鈥檚 toll roads. This created a situation where a Javanese merchant travelling from Yogyakarta to Semarang had to pay fees to the Dutch toll road agents. A portion of those fees then went to the sultan, who used them to back-stop debts being incurred by Javanese landowners as they bought back their own land back from European plantation owners.

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Problems with a bottom-up approach to governance reform: Evidence from India

There is a neoliberal consensus pioneered by and in the 1940s and 1950s in the idea that a market economy-like organisation of sub-national units in a federation will result in overall gains in institutional performance. Literature has focused on the guided by the principle that devolved government is better able to respond to voters鈥 choices. This rests on the assumption that . In this article, I ask whether the prioritisation of service delivery in healthcare and education sectors is indeed something that varies across states in India. The Indian federal system has been increasingly under pressure to devolve power to the states since the economy was set on a path to liberalisation. Initially, this pressure came from the outside, through international institutions (Bretton Woods, largely) but this opportunity was instantaneously accepted by . This has taken shape in the form of reduced centralised monitoring of service delivery, and the funds previously allocated to this end are now being directly transferred to states who have unconditional leeway to allocate it to various uses. This occurred too suddenly without a mechanism in place to safeguard and ensure the equitable delivery of essential services in healthcare and education, and an ever widening gap among states.

fig1Source:

Building on to this, we also have inter-regional issues due to clustering economies. by disgraceful margins. There is a race to the bottom on regulatory easing for corporations, and inter-state bargaining for central resources is competitive, rather than cooperative. Transplantation of a European approach to governance and institutions in the Indian context has meant that natural resources are being plundered by sub-national governments to , as their citizens remain deprived. Public hospitals and primary healthcare infrastructure are slowly decaying into obscurity as shiny, . This is the same case within the , cheap, private schools largely targeting the middle class are driving away resources and interest away from the public school system, which in its crippled state cannot justify a case to be the recipient of sub-national governments鈥 interest.听Read More »

Ephemeral universalism in the social protection response to the COVID-19 lockdown in the Philippines

By Emma Lynn Dadap-Cantal, Andrew M. Fischer and Charmaine G. Ramos

Since March 2020, the Philippines has implemented one of the world鈥檚 strictest and longest lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused severe disruptions in peoples鈥 livelihoods. The government鈥檚 emergency social protection response, the 鈥楽ocial Amelioration Program鈥 (SAP), has also been notably massive, introducing one-off near-universal income protection. It is an insightful case given that the country鈥檚 existing social assistance system has been celebrated as a model for developing countries, even though it has been mostly bypassed in the emergency response. Moreover, the country鈥檚 highly stratified and fragmented social policy system has resulted in implementation delays and irregularities that have fostered social hostilities and undermined the potential for such momentary universalism to have lasting transformative effects.

The Philippine government first imposed its 鈥榗ommunity quarantine鈥 on 15 March, which has since been extended until 30 June. Thus far, the pandemic has not been severe relative to evolving global indicators, with 302 confirmed infections per million people and 11 confirmed deaths per million people as of 25 June (although at only 5,760 tests per million people, these confirmed rates are likely to be significantly underestimated). However, as elsewhere in the Global South, the lockdown has thrown the country into an employment crisis given that more than 60 percent of its workforce is informal, most in precarious situations even when earning above the official poverty line.

In response, the government rolled out the 鈥楽ocial Amelioration Program鈥 (SAP), comprising at least 13 different schemes and with an estimated total budget equivalent to as much as 3.1 percent of the country鈥檚 GDP [1]. The largest scheme is the Emergency Subsidy Program (ESP), which has been allocated 200 billion Philippines pesos (PhP; about 3.5 billion euros), more than three times the combined budget of all the other schemes.Read More »

COVID in Pakistan, the Role of Middle-Classes and the Unprecedented Demand for a New Social Contract

Screenshot 2020-06-21 at 10.15.40

A conversation with and Dr. Juvaria Jafri and Dr. Aasim Sajjad.

is Professor of Political Economy at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-e-Azam University and a founder of the Awami Workers Party (AWP).听 His research has focused on state theory, informality, colonial history, rise of the middle classes and social movements in Pakistan. His latest book is 鈥.

is a Lecturer in International Political Economy at City University. Her research is on financial development in Pakistan, including inclusive finance, fintech, and impact investing strategies. Her latest co-edited book is

Introduction

The full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on developing countries is still unfolding. While many countries have managed to achieve some stability in eliminating the spread of the crisis, others are struggling on various fronts. In South Asia, India has received much global attention owing to the violence of a hasty lockdown which was imposed without warning and an accompanying social safety net. Other countries in the region including Bangladesh, Srilanka and Nepal also continue to grapple with the existential question of how to ensure that contagion control does not come at the expense of destroying livelihoods.听

In this interview we focus on the situation in Pakistan. We invited Aasim Sajjad and Juvaria Jafri to address some questions related to the current situation in Pakistan. The following four questions were designed to provide a glimpse of how the pandemic is impacting the existing socio-economic structure of the Pakistani economy particularly focusing on class inequality, fin-tech as a potential solution and the activist and citizen-led first historic demand for a long-term welfare package.听

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Addressing the Pandemic in the Philippines Necessitates a New Economic Paradigm

Rodrigo_Duterte_delivers_his_message_to_the_Filipino_community_in_Vietnam_during_a_meeting_on_September_28In his late-night on 6 April, Rodrigo Duterte, the populist President of the Philippines, echoed the affirmation of leaders from rich countries in North America, Europe, and Asia: to do for the economy to survive the pandemic. The problem, however, is that, on his own admission, Duterte is incompetent in economics. His stubbornly is even more problematic when dealing with complex developmental causes and impacts of the coronavirus outbreak.

Yet the Philippine state鈥檚 inadequate institutional capacity to respond to the epidemic goes deeper. Given the national economy鈥檚 position in the hierarchical global economic system, its structural weaknesses impacts on how effective the government鈥檚 response can be. The current mainstream approaches to resolve the pandemic and the multiple crises of capitalism would fail to address the convoluted historical process of maldevelopment of the Philippines. Thus, a radical political strategy with a new economic paradigm for post-pandemic reconstruction is needed.听听听听Read More »

Financializing state capitalism: Exchanges, financial infrastructures & the active management of capital markets in China

DCE trading floorThe development of capital markets has been a core focus of financialization research. For Epstein, financialization 鈥鈥, while Pike and Pollard define financialization as the 鈥鈥. Other scholars also attribute a significant role to capital markets in financialization processes, be it in the , the rise of , or 鈥鈥. At the heart of and as a precondition of many aspects of financialization stand capital markets and their development.听

This is not only the case when it comes to financialization in advanced economies, but also with respect to the study of . Financialization processes are not uniform, they are rather variegated and refracted by national institutional settings that lead to . As Lapavitsas and Powell emphasized, 鈥鈥. This has also been picked up in debates about the relationship between financialization and the state. Previously, many scholars argued that financialization often results in a and the effects on developing economies are often described as potentially negative with financialization for instance or . But stemming from earlier discussions on , more recent scholarship has highlighted that . It argues that an increasing takes place in which state and (quasi-)state institutions often co-constitute financialization processes.听

Contributing to the growing literatures on variegated financialization and the state, in a paper titled 鈥鈥 (recently published in ) I argue that states are not only important actors facilitating financialization but can also exercise a considerable degree of control over financialization, thereby shaping its very form. Instead of a financialization process that , what we see in China is a 鈥榝inancialization with Chinese characteristics鈥 where the state actively tries to manage financialization and its social outcomes.听Read More »