In multiple ways multilateralism, or the coming together of the international community to further global good, is under challenge today. 鈥楥onflicts鈥�, not least among them the genocide in Gaza, are an obvious challenge. But there is in the economic sphere a silent subversion of multilateralism underway that also needs to be stalled and reversed. This is the view that the 鈥渇inancing for development challenge鈥� is so huge and the share of the private sector in the holding and disposal of the world鈥檚 financial surpluses so large, that it is only private initiative that can successfully implement the programmes needed to realise the SDGs and address damaging climate change.
The corollary of that position is that the role of governments is no more to try and move surpluses from private to public hands (through new forms of international tax cooperation, for example) but to use the available public resources as means to unlock private investments and expenditures. The call is to go beyond the recognition that the tasks of realising the SDGs, ensuring the needed carbon transition, and building resilience the world over, are primarily governmental or 鈥榩ublic鈥� responsibilities, and that cooperation among governments (or multilateralism) is the best means to implement those tasks. Pragmatism demands, it is argued, that these tasks and therefore multilateralism, or the conjoint responsibilities of global governments, must be 鈥渙utsourced鈥�.
In the realm of聽, the 鈥榳hite saviour鈥� trope has long been a subject of聽. This phenomenon, often rooted in colonialist attitudes, positions Western individuals or entities as benevolent rescuers of non-Western communities, usually without acknowledging or addressing systemic multidimensional inequalities, colonial/racial privilege, and local agency of indigenous communities. The white saviour complex has not only perpetuated聽聽but has also聽聽the efforts and voices of those it claims to help.
As artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a global force to potentially , we see a new manifestation of the white saviour industrial complex within emerging global AI governance.
The Gender and Trade Coalition was initiated in 2018 by feminist and progressive activists to put forward feminist trade analysis and advocate for equitable trade policy.
This article is the third in a series of short, Q&A format 鈥榚xplainers鈥� unpacking key trade issues produced for the Gender and Trade Coalition by Regions Refocus. It was written by Erica Levenson (Regions Refocus) with inputs from Carol Barton (WIMN) and Catherine Tactaquin (WIMN). The authors give their thanks to Neha Misra (Solidarity Center), Irem Arf (ITUC), Liepollo Lebohang Pheko (Trade Collective), and Mariama Williams (ILE), who reviewed various versions of the article and provided helpful feedback. Read the full article and catch up on past explainers .
1. What Does Trade Have to do With Migration?
The movement of people is a phenomenon as old as human history, and indeed predates nation-states. Migration is not something that begins and ends so much as it is a process, from the roots of the conditions which form the imperative to migrate, to the migration journey, gradual integration, and complex notions of citizenship and identity. This is precisely what makes migration flows a reflection of the social, economic, and political context in which they happen. Modern migration flows, then, reflect the stark structural inequalities that exist in the global economic order. This view correlates to the core-periphery model of migration, which sees migration as the result of acute labor shortages in capitalist centers that need to be filled through migration inflows from peripheries, drawing parallels to the Marxian concept of a reserve army of labor (Sassen-Koob 1981). As feminist scholars have argued, continuous flows of labor power from the Global South to the North are possible not simply due to the will of the Global North, but because institutions in countries of origin facilitate them (Nawyn 2010).
Rather than this core-periphery model of migration, a simplistic push-pull model guides migration provisions in international trade agreements. Informed by neoclassical economics, the push-pull model assumes that migration is the result of micro-level decision making processes that weigh the 鈥榩ros and cons鈥� of migration, envisioning a simplistic calculation of factors such as perceived wage differentials, employment conditions, and migration costs. Migration is effectively reduced to a household decision meant 鈥渢o minimize risks to family income or to overcome capital constraints鈥� (Aldaba 2000, 6).
There is a persistent assumption in trade governance that migration and trade are substitutes. Both European Union and United States policymakers have tried to substitute open markets for open immigration policies: to open their markets to exports from states in the Global South in order to reduce migration. This was the explicit goal of former US President George H.W. Bush when he signed NAFTA, and of the EU in liberalizing trade with Northern African states (Campaniello 2014). Simultaneously as the US and EU agreed to liberalize trade, they increased their border policing and passed restrictive migration policies. But these and other free trade agreements have failed to curb migration through substitution because of a key flaw in their assumption: that increasing free trade leads to increases in GDP and wages in developing countries. In fact, quite the opposite is true鈥� trade liberalization has severely hindered the economies of developing countries. Consequently, free trade agreements have actually increased migration in the long-term (Orefice 2013).
There is a clear gap in structural understandings of the relationship between trade and migration and a need to challenge the ideologies of the people governing them. It is high time to acknowledge the many unfulfilled promises which have been hung on trade liberalization and the socioeconomic catastrophes it has instead led to (Aguinaga et al. 2013; Bener铆a, Deere, and Kabeer 2012; Flynn and Kofman 2004; Hannah, Roberts, and Trommer 2021; Harrison 1997). A critical feminist analysis of the relationship between trade and migration points out the numerous connections between deeply unequal trade and migration governance regimes and illuminates urgent areas in need of improvement.
鈥淥ne of the chief contributions to peace that the Bretton Woods program offers is that it will free the small and even the middle-sized nations from the danger of economic aggression by more powerful neighbours. The lesser nation will no longer be obliged to look to a single powerful country for monetary support or capital for development, and have to make dangerous political and economic concessions in the process. Political independence in the past has often proved to be sham when economic independence did not go with it.鈥� 鈥擧enry Morgenthou Jr (1945)
The world economy has a Dollar problem. Reliance on the currency of a single country as the world鈥檚 chief way to organise trade, carry out financial settlements, and store value creates a series of inequitable economic imbalances and policy tensions鈥攂oth within the US and across the global economy. It bestows disproportionate economic and political power on the US government and financial institutions; exposes world trade and finance to聽聽originating in the Dollar zone; imposes huge costs on the world鈥檚 small and even middle-sized nations; and fuels聽聽in the US financial sector, bolstering its influence in that country鈥檚 political economy.
A Historical Problem
This problem is not new. In fact, the inability to develop an equitable and genuinely multilateral international monetary system is one of capitalism鈥檚 most striking institutional failures, going back to the early days of the industrial revolution. The gold standard of that time and its successors have always some economies at the expense of others, and created favouring the interests of creditors and capital, at the expense of debtors and wage earners.
Only once in the history of capitalism did policy-makers from leading capitalist powers even consider the possibility of building a genuinely multilateral, equitable system: during the on the post-World-War-II economic order. But despite the aspirations and statements of participants like John M Keynes and then-US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthou Jr, the Bretton Woods conference led to the creation of , under which foreign central banks could present dollars to the Federal Reserve for exchange into gold.
That system effectively charged US authorities with the supply of the world鈥檚 ultimate international reserves. In this task they were constrained only by the willingness of central banks in other states to hold Dollars instead of gold. As French Finance Minister Giscard d鈥橢staing put it in the 1960s, this arrangement defined an for the US economy, which enjoyed a lot of space for effectively issuing Dollars to acquire goods and assets overseas.
By the late 1960s, it became clear that the US economy under the Bretton Woods system. Its steady in international trade, fiscal pressures from its protracted, losing war in Vietnam, and increases in social spending in response to domestic political turmoil, led to growing trade deficits, mass outflows of Dollars, and concerns that US authorities would not be able to meet foreign demand for convertibility of greenbacks into gold. In response, the US unilaterally abandoned its commitment to convertibility in 1971.
Coming amidst a series of successful national liberation and anti-colonial struggles across the world, the US鈥檚 inability to sustain the Bretton Woods system fed hopes that a new, equitable international monetary order could be constructed. The 1974聽聽for a New International Economic Order explicitly pointed to the need for a new monetary system centered on the 鈥減romotion of the development of the developing countries and the adequate flow of real resources to them鈥� as means to dismantle 鈥渢he remaining vestiges of colonial domination鈥� and removing the obstacles in the way of international convergence in measures of economic development and living standards.
Most people interested in development know about the World Bank and probably some of the bigger regional development banks, like the Asian Development Bank. But few people realise there is a system of 30 functioning multilateral development banks (MDBs). Indeed, we did not initially realise there were quite so many because there was no comprehensive tally or an academic study analysing them all. We set out to explore whether the MDBs work as a system and what role they play in promoting both debt and development so here is a short summary of some of our key finding on these three issues.
By Jimi O. Adesina, Andrew M. Fischer and Nimi Hoffmann
In a , published on 22 December 2020, that he as the most important thing he wrote in 2020, Nic Cheeseman penned a strong criticism of what he calls the 鈥榤odel of authoritarian development鈥� in Africa. This phrase refers specifically to Ethiopia and Rwanda, the only two countries that fit the model, which is otherwise not generalisable to the rest of the continent. His argument, in a nutshell, is that donors have been increasingly enamoured with these two countries because they are seen as producing results. Yet the recent conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia shows that this argument needs to be questioned and discarded. He calls for supporting democracy in Africa, which he claims performs better in the long run than authoritarian regimes, especially in light of the conflicts and repression that inevitably emerge under authoritarianism. His argument could also be read as an implicit call for regime change, stoking donors to intensify political conditionalities on these countries before things get even worse.
Cheeseman鈥檚 argument rests on a number of misleading empirical assertions which have important implications for the conclusions that he draws. In clarifying these, our point is not to defend authoritarianism. Instead, we hope to inject a measure of interpretative caution and to guard against opportunistically using crises to fan the disciplinary zeal of donors, particularly in a context of increasingly militarised aid regimes that have been associated with disastrous ventures into regime change.
We make two points. First, his story of aid dynamics in Ethiopia is not supported by the data he cites, which instead reflect the rise of economic 鈥榬eform鈥� programmes pushed by the World Bank and IMF. The country鈥檚 current economic difficulties also need to be placed in the context of the systemic financial crisis currently slamming the continent, in which both authoritarian and (nominally) democratic regimes are faring poorly.
Second, we reflect on Cheeseman鈥檚 vision of aid as a lever of regime change. Within already stringent economic adjustment programmes, his call for intensifying political conditionalities amounts to a Good Governance Agenda 2.0. It ignores the legacy of the structural adjustment programmes in on the continent during the 1980s and 1990s.
A new report published by the Washington DC office of the Heinrich 叠枚濒濒 Foundation reviews the recent initiative being led by the G20countries and their respectivedevelopment finance institutions, including the major multilateral development banks, for the financialization of development lending that is based on the stepped-up use of securitization markets.
The report details how the initiative goes beyond the Washington Consensus reforms of the last few decades by calling on developing countries to adopt even farther-reaching degrees of financial liberalization on a new order of magnitude. In what Prof. Daniela Gabor of the University of West England, Bristol, 鈥�the Wall Street Consensus,鈥� such reforms would involve a wholesale reorganizationof the financial sectors and the creation of new financial markets in developing countries in order to accommodate the investment practices of global institutional investors.
The new report, 鈥�鈥� describes the key elements of the new initiative 鈥� specifically how securitization markets work and how the effort is designed to greatly increase the amount financing available for projects in developing countries by attracting new streams of private investment from private capital markets. The paper introduces the basic logic underpinning the initiative: to leverage the MDBs鈥� current USD 150 billion in annual public development lending into literally USD trillions for new development finance. In fact, the World Bank had initially called the initiative 鈥淔rom Billions to Trillions,鈥� before finally calling it, 鈥淢aximizing Finance for Development.鈥�
While securitization can be useful for individual investors and borrowers under certain circumstances, the proposal to use securitization markets to finance international development projects in developing countries raises a set of major concerns. The report lists 7 important ways in which the G20-DFI initiative introduces a wide range of new risks to the financial systems in 诲别惫别濒辞辫颈苍驳听countries while undermining autonomous efforts at national economic development.
The key risks of securitization are:
The inherent risk because securitization relies on the use of the 鈥渟hadow banking鈥� system that is based on over-leveraged, high-risk investments that are largely unregulated and not backed by governments during financial crises;
The extensive use of public-private partnerships, despite the poor track record ofPPPs, many of which have ended up costing taxpayers as much if not more than if theinvestments had been undertaken with traditional public financing;
The degree of proposed deregulation reforms in the domestic financial sector required of developing countries would undermine the ability of 鈥渄evelopmental states鈥� to regulatefinance in favor of national economic development;
The degree of financial deregulation required would also undermine sovereignty by makingthe national economy increasingly dependent on short–term flows from global private capitalmarkets and thereby undermine the sovereign power of governments and their autonomouscontrol of the domestic economy;
The uncertainty relating to governance and accountability for the environmental, social andgovernance standards associated with development projects. Such accountabilityhas been fixed to traditional forms of public MDB financing for development project loans,but as future ownership of assets is commercialized and financialized, fiduciary obligationsto investors may override obligations to enforce ESG implementation;
The deepening of the domestic financial sectors in developing countries, as required by theinitiative, can create vulnerability as the size of the financial sector grows relative to that ofthe real sector within economies; and
The privatization and commercialization of public services, including infrastructure services,as called for by the initiative, has faced a growing backlash as reflected by the global trendof remunicipalizations. The fact that the securitization initiative is being promoted in such ahigh profile way by the G20 and leading DFIs despite all of these risks reflects an intensifiedcontest between those supporting the public interest and those supporting the private interest.
The report also documents the relatively minor degree of interest expressed so far by global financial markets in the initiative, suggesting it is not likely to galvanize the trillions of dollars claimed by its proponents.
It concludes by reviewing the arguments for the scaled up use of traditional public financing mechanisms and several of the important ways in which this can be done, including steps that could be taken by G20 countries, DFIs and governments.
Rick Rowden聽recently completed his PhD in Economic Studies and Planning from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi.
More expansionary fiscal and monetary policies聽are needed to meet the Sustainable Development Goals
This month, the international community will gather at the United Nations in New York to review progress on the implementation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are intended to reduce poverty, hunger and economic inequality and promote development, particularly in developing countries. But only one of the SDGs, #17, says anything about how to finance all the efforts. While SDG 17 calls for more international cooperation and foreign aid, it only suggests that developing countries strengthen domestic resource mobilization (DRM) by improving their tax collection and curtailing illicit financial flows, etc.
While important, this approach neglects much bigger problems with the prevailing set of macroeconomic policies that hamper the ability of developing countries to increase public investment, employment and scale-up the long-term investments in the underlying health and education infrastructure needed to achieve the SDGs. The policy framework used in many developing countries is characterized by an overly restrictive low-inflation target achieved by using high interest rates and backed up by strict inflation targeting regimes at independent central banks.Read More »
黑料社区 