By Nicolette Makovicky and J枚rg Wiegratz
Faced with rampant fraud and corruption, government and civic actors in Slovakia and Uganda have in response turned to appeals to discourses of public ethics, and personal responsibility, and patriotism rather than addressing issues of political economy and power.
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The recent by a Senior World Bank Official, against the Centre for Global Development (CGD) has been rightly publicised on social media, for failing to engage with critique and misconstruing it as ideology. The encounter was based on a discussion with a CGD economist, where an excerpt of a of World Bank鈥檚 much debated Ease of Doing Business Index was presented. The well researched and evidence-based critique prompted an unwarranted response by the World Bank employee, where the CGD economists were labelled as 鈥榬eformed Marxists鈥� and the critique labelled as originating from Das-Capital.Read More »
Earlier this month the final deadline arrived for political parties in Brazil to register their candidates for the presidential election in October 2018. The official launch of candidates allows us to discuss more concretely the political forces and players that will be shaping the election. It means that coalitions, alliances, and vice-president choices have taken place. So we asked, what can be said about the first candidates leading the polls? What are the main political forces underlying this election?
The Brazilian political landscape has been extremely polarised since the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016. If the left-right dichotomy has recently been considered blurry or outdated, in Brazil one can argue that, due to the impeachment, this dichotomy has a new face, with the coup winners on one extreme and the coup losers on the other.
The nuances between right and left on the political spectrum have largely been overshadowed due to this dichotomy, with one side leading a for a clean and corruption-free country and the other side highlighting the . The political mayhem reached its peak with Lula’s trial and conviction in April, which has led to a great deal of uncertainty over this period (see recent Lula鈥檚 from prison in the NYT).
President Termer may have been able to 鈥渒eep the markets calm in鈥� throughout such political instability, but Brazil鈥檚 economic recovery has been , hardships for many families have increased (see IBGE indicators for increases in , , and ) and the country has just set a new record for homicides at in 2017, with violence against women also increasing. There is a lot at stake in this election.Read More »
A new by titled Panama Papers and the Looting of Africa provides insights into how complex corporate structures are used deliberately to hide away massive amounts of capital in tax havens. His findings depart from the popular discourse and approach to illicit financial flows, which has generally focused on how developing countries are poorly governed (the so-called ), rather than on systemic failure in the global financial architecture.
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