Infrastructure – 黑料社区

Agricultural production, sectoral imbalances and inflation in Albania: A Kaleckian view

December 12, 2022November 25, 2022 mimozashabaniLeave a comment

The current remarkable surge in inflation is considered to be a nearly global phenomena (Reinhart and Lucker 2022), affecting both developed and developing nations. While there may be common drivers of inflation, such as factors associated with the Covid-19 pandemic followed by Russia鈥檚 invasion of Ukraine, there are considerable variations in the causes of it, especially with reference to developing countries, including Albania. Drawing on Kalecki鈥檚 (1976) Essays on Developing Economies, I argue that there are also domestic factors attributed to the increase in inflation that resides in the structural sectoral imbalances of the Albanian economy.

Rising prices in Albania sparked protests across the country in March 2022. The protests highlighted the rise in food prices which increased by more than 9% compared to March in the previous year; with the price of bread being the main contributor to such increase. With Albanians spending more than 42% of their total budget on food, rising prices of 鈥榥ecessities鈥� adds more pressure to the poor households to make ends meet. Nearly a quarter of Albanians, 640,000 people, already live in poverty (Kote 2022) and soaring prices in the economy could push people further into poverty. But what is pushing food prices to soar in a country where agricultural land accounts for 24% of overall land, a good Mediterranean climate, and water resources, all of which are crucial for agricultural development? Despite these favourable conditions, the productive capacity of Albania鈥檚 agriculture sector to meet domestic demand for food and feed meets is only one third (World Bank, 2022a). 聽

Economic Corridors as Infrastructures of Extraction

July 13, 2021July 8, 2021 charliethame4 Comments

Economic Corridors

Economic corridors are geographically targeted development initiatives currently under construction on nearly every continent of the planet. While hard infrastructure such as transportation links, power generation, ports, and industrial zones contrive a spine, economic corridors are distinguished by accompanying “soft infrastructure” including business-friendly policies, regulations, and institutions to facilitate trade and investment. They feature prominently in foreign policy and development initiatives worldwide and have provided They will likely do the same for those spurred by the recently announced by the G7. Yet despite being around for over twenty years,

Notable exceptions to this dearth of conceptual engagement include those framing them as a form of , and In an article recently published in the : a constellation of policy prescriptions that advance processes of valorisation and accumulation based on the subjugation of human and extra human nature to intensified exploitation. The adjective “extractivist” here denotes This includes but is not limited to the plundering of the earth and biosphere, extending also to social dimensions of exploitation, such as the reorganisation of production and social relations that enable production.

Land, property, technology: interrogating an infrastructural promise

May 20, 2021May 14, 2021 daivirtLeave a comment

Land has served as a central means of sustenance, but also as a nexus of wealth and power for people throughout the ages. The has estimated that more than seventy percent of the world鈥檚 population lack access to legally registered land titles. Existing land registries are centralized databases, vulnerable to corruption and destruction. There is an increasing turn towards emerging technologies such as blockchain for recording the relationships between people and land, coordinating and synchronizing that data for efficient governance, and making the information publicly available.

This essay explores the abstraction of blockchain as employed for formalizing land rights in emerging economies. Behind the seemingly neutral fa莽ade of the technology, diverse aspirational claims and narratives guide its implementation in different societies, shaped by particular histories and socio-political contexts. This highlights the need to explore blockchain-based land registries as distributed knowledge infrastructures, uncovering their broader embeddedness in older, non-digital modalities, and the 鈥減eopled infrastructures鈥� of informal networks with their histories and cultural repertoires. As digital technologies can facilitate an illusion of enhanced visibility of some elements while obscuring others, I argue that more attention is needed to the role of broader colonial legacies and enduring North-South inequalities that frequently remain backgrounded in the adoption of such technologies.

An increasing number of governments are investigating the prospects of transferring their land registries to blockchain (). Blockchain applications are explored as enabling the formalization of property rights in the countries of the Global South, as well as providing more efficient coordination of real property markets in the Global North. Blockchain registries have several advantages as compared to centralized digital or paper-based databases. Records on blockchain are distributed and verified by a multitude of nodes in a peer-to-peer digital network, affording them more transparency and resilience. As new additions to the chain of blocks are cryptographically time-stamped, this makes tampering or accidental data loss less likely. Auto-executing 鈥渟mart contracts鈥� that transform legal agreements into code could mediate contracts ().

Less flow, more pressure: accessing water in N鈥橠jamena in times of Covid-19

March 5, 2021February 22, 2021 ismaelmaazazLeave a comment

鈥淵ou need pressure to make water flow鈥�

Pressure is not always a metaphor for 鈥渃onstraints鈥� or 鈥渂urden鈥�; it is also a concrete and basic requirement for municipal water supply. Across many cities of the Global South, end-users, city officials, development NGO professionals or agents of the water business (street porters, water fountain managers or public water tap owners) struggle to provide and access water services 鈥� a process often characterized by negotiation and contestation. In N鈥橠jamena, Chad, hardships linked to everyday water access fuel two distinct paradoxes. First, maintaining water pressure is a constant source of economic pressure. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, end-users were already compelled to adapt their 鈥渉ydraulic habits鈥� to their needs and financial resources. Evidence on the ground indicates that the pandemic has introduced a second paradox: the Chadian state has taken official steps to mitigate economic pressure in the daily life of inhabitants in Chad funding a 6 month free water policy, but this has done little in practice beyond decreasing the water pressure (the necessary force that pushes water through pipe, makes it flow and available to end-users) for N鈥橠jamenois who need it most. As such, this blog post argues that economic pressure for the poor has increased while water pressure has dropped as a result of the pandemic and a government intervention that explicitly aimed at addressing the issue Quite predictably, the pandemic has generated additional economic constraints on informal businesses and might have complicated an already knotty landscape in addition to tremendous climate-related problems, foremost among them flooding. However, available evidence suggests that the policy designed to alleviate the burden of bills on those in need failed. Instead of increasing water availability, it reduced and in some cases even cut the water flow. The limited extension of the water supply network also made the policy pointless to many, while wealthier end-users connected to the water supply network enjoyed the policy as a bonanza. This demonstrates that infrastructural expansion, not just emergency funding, is critical to any meaningful water and sanitation improvements.

Sino State Capital and the Strengthening of Serbian Stabilitocracy

December 21, 2020December 31, 2020 imogenliu2 Comments

Chinese labour workers and their team manager laying the tracks on the Belgrade-Stara Pazova section of the Belgrade-Budapest railway. Source: author鈥檚 own.

The Belgrade-Budapest Railway has been lauded as the flagship Belt and Road project of the wider Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, and as such is promoted by Beijing as a successful template for Sino-CEE cooperation concluded via the 17+1 initiative, established in 2012 to foster relations between China and 17 CEE countries. In its host context of Hungary and Serbia, the investment has been politicised from the get-go, wherein criticism has largely focused on the project鈥檚 violation of EU public procurement , which require competitive dialogue and open-tender processes for projects of substantial size.

We would expect the Belgrade-Budapest Railway to be subject to greater scrutiny in both Hungary, as an EU member state, and Serbia, where of the EU is an important cornerstone of regime legitimacy, stemming from broad-based support for EU integration and cooperation. While this has played out in Hungary where there have been protests and where the EU launched against the construction for non-compliance, the Serbian section has proceeded relatively unhindered.

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