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

The agricultural sector has always been important for the Albanian economy, in terms of both value added and employability. Even though the country has undergone major economic transformation since the fall of communism three decades ago, the agricultural sector continues to be one of the main contributors to the country鈥檚 economy. The agricultural sector accounts for more than 19% of GDP, as of 2020. However, this is a substantial decline since the mid-1990s, in which the share of the sector in the economy was more than 36%.   

At the same time, it appears the country has bolstered industrial capacity, with the industry increasing steadily since late 1990s with construction being the most important component of the sector. The industry sector has also become the main economic sector in terms of employability growth. As of the end of 2021, the annual growth rate in the industry sector increased by 7.5%, followed by the services sector with the number of employed increasing by 7.2%. In contrary, the annual growth rate of employability in the agriculture sector decreased by 5.3% at the end of 2021. According to the Labour Force Survey (2009), the share of employability for the agriculture sector in 2007 was 47% of total employability of people aged between 15-64 years old. However, the importance of the sector in terms of employability has steadily declined over the last two decades, accounting for around 41% in 2020.

There is a large literature emphasising the vital role the agriculture sector plays in the process of economic growth in developing countries (see for example Johnson and Mellor, 1961; Gollin et al 2002; Storm 1995). However, as well as being central in promoting economic growth, of equal importance is the sector鈥檚 role in maintaining non-inflationary growth. Kalecki (1976) writings on issues of financing economic growth, highlight the importance of the sector in dissuading domestically produced inflationary tendencies. He recognised that a crucial challenge for developing countries is that of increasing the productive capacity in the economy, and whilst he argued that this (expand productive capacity) can be achieved through increasing investment, the latter could potentially induce inflationary pressures. Kalecki鈥檚 short and to the point articles on issues related to development economics argue that then when employment in industry increases, it generates higher levels of income, leading to a higher demand of necessities (which are basic needs goods). On the other hand, if the capacity of the agriculture sector is unable to meet the increased demand, this leads to higher prices for necessities goods. This way, Kalecki is able to illustrate through a simple model, how increased investment could result in bottlenecks in the supply of necessities. It is through this analysis that he explains how the structural characteristics of the economy could potentially lead to inflation being produced domestically.  

Therefore, investment in infrastructure should be accompanied with measures to expand agricultural production with the aim to increase the supply of necessities, in an attempt to avoid inflationary pressures. The alternative of course, is to rely on imports to meet the rise in demand for necessities. Indeed, Albania鈥檚 reliance on imports for food has increased by more than 21% in the period between 2017-2011, with imports reaching ALL130 billion ($1.08billion). Such reliance and exposure to foreign markets and the recent global supply chain disruptions, has inevitably led to higher food prices in Albania – increasing to 14% more than in the previous year, latest data in September 2020 shows.

The productivity of the Albanian agriculture sector has declined in recent years significantly. In mid-2021 the sector increased only by 0.11%, with construction dominating with a 25% increase. The World Bank (2022b) reports that access to finance and land fragmentation are of great concerns and significantly prevent the agriculture sector expanding production. In early 2022, Albanian farmers addressed the severe difficulties the country鈥檚 agricultural sector is facing, and took to the streets to rally against soaring prices of agricultural inputs, calling for more government support. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) report, Albanian farmers receive the lowest government support in the region, receiving only 鈧� 3 million per year in subsidies. The sector also receives the lowest government support relative to the other sectors in the economy. Indeed, agriculture spending accounted for 1.9% of total government spending for the period between 2010-2017. This is considerably lower than what education, healthcare and house building are receiving 10.9%, 9.4% and 6.7% of total government support, respectively.

To sum up, development issues require a multisectoral analysis. The argument provided here is that indeed sectorial imbalances could bring about inflation. In particular, in developing economies, a demand induced by a rise in investment in infrastructure and industry should be associated with a rise in the capacity of production of the agricultural sector. The rise in the production capacity may be achieved by measures such as the provision of cheap bank credit and other forms of assistance such as government subsidies. In light of recent developments, with Albania鈥檚 agricultural productivity at it lowest, increased exposure to foreign goods markets and the global supply chain disruption, it is important for the country to focus on achieving and maintaining agriculture development.

References

Gollin, D. Parente, S. and Rogerson, R. 2002. The role of agriculture in development, American Economic Association, 92(2), pp. 160-164.

Johnston, F.B. and Melor, W. J. 1961. The role of agriculture in economic development, American Economic  Association, 51(4), pp.566-593.

Kalecki,M.(1976) Essays on Developing Economies, 鈥淭he Problem of Financing Economic Development鈥�  and  `Problems of Financing Economic Development in a Mixed Economy鈥� Hassocks, Harvester Press

Kote, Kristo., (2022), Basic products鈥� price jumped 14%-24% in April, Albanian Daily News, 10 May 2022, Accessed on 24 May 2022. Available on: .

Reinhart, Carmen and Clemens Graf Von Lucker, (2022), The return of global inflation, World Bank Blogs, 14 February 2022, accessed on 25 May 2022, available on: .

Storm, S. 1995. On the role of agriculture in India鈥檚 longer-term development strategy, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 19(6), pp. 761-788.

World Bank (2022a), The future of water in agriculture in Albania- A broad sector rethinking, World Bank Group. 

World Bank (2022b), Creating markets in Albania: Taking advantage of new trade and investment opportunities for a more robust private sector- Country Private Sector Diagnostic, World Bank Group, June 2022.

Mimoza Shabani is Senior Lecturer in Financial Economics at the Royal Docks School of Business and Law, University of East London.

Photo by .

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.

The Conventional Rationale

The article thereby offers a Marxist-inspired structuralist account of the global political economy of corridor building that challenges the salubrious view of economic corridors as tools for development found in the grey literature. To do so, it outlines what I call the “conventional rationale” that is used by multilateral development banks and donor states to convince dominated states and classes of their utility as a means to inclusive and sustainable development. To challenge this dominant understanding the article outlines four key contentions that contest important pillars on which it rests.

Economic Corridors as an Extractivist Paradigm

These are as follows: 1) The first is that corridors are a “fix” for crises of capitalism. While the conventional paradigm presents corridors as tools to facilitate investments in underdeveloped regions, the article contends corridors should instead be understood as tools that offset crises of overaccumulation by securing corporate profitability amid stagnation and decline in dominant states and regions. 2) The second is that corridors exacerbate class struggle. The conventional paradigm rests on a view of globalisation as a benign equilibrium-seeking process where market forces freed from state interference work to benefit all. The article contends instead that economic corridor development is precipitated by and exacerbates class struggle, empowering fractions of capital over those of labour, the environment, and the public. This generates novel social forces such as new proletariat classes and alliances of business elites and actors harnessing state power to accumulate wealth, leading to new forms of exploitation, dispossession, marginalisation, and exclusion. 3) The third is that corridors are tools for exploitation. While the conventional paradigm presents them as tools for development by allowing developing countries to participate in the global economy by engaging in low technology and labour intensive production, the article contends instead that economic corridors exacerbate the exploitation of human and extra-human nature, facilitating extraction of wealth through unequal exchange, contributing to divergence and polarisation along new geographical and class-based lines. 4) The fourth and final contention is that corridors facilitate financial extraction. While the conventional paradigm presents the financialisation of infrastructure associated with corridors as a way of mobilising finance for development, the article contends this should instead be understood as an additional mechanism for the extraction of wealth from dominated states and classes. It therefore echoes

A Framework for Future Research on Economic Corridors

The article is developed with empirical reference to economic corridors in mainland Southeast Asia, recognised as the first and one of the most , but it aims to identify a set of extractivist dynamics integral to the concept of economic corridors and hence also operative elsewhere. To this end, it calls for further empirical work on corridors across the globe to help generalise the framework and refine it. This may take inspiration from the article by exploring, for example: a) to what extent corridor development elsewhere has been driven by attempts to offset capitalism鈥檚 crisis tendencies through various extractivist “fixes鈥�? Might corridors be transformed into investments that contribute to substantive development? b) how have subaltern classes beyond the Mekong region been impacted by corridor development? What forms of struggle have been waged and how might they be strengthened?  c) How much wealth has been extracted through corridor-related infrastructure? Are we able to quantify value transfers directly attributable to these corridors to challenge mainstream metrics of success related to FDI inflows and GDP output? d) Might subaltern classes leverage emerging geopolitical tensions between, say, the G7 and China to secure concessions and enhance their power in institutions influencing corridor development and governance?

The four theses proposed in the article are not intended to be exhaustive, and readers of this blog may find additional propositions help better understand the essentially extractivist nature of economic corridors, or offer further empirical data in support of the argument. My hope is that the article stimulates more critical discussion on these initiatives in order to shed more light on the impacts of these corridors, particularly on dominated states and classes.

Charlie Thame is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University. He tweets at .

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 ().

Legacies of dispossession

Blockchain technology, the design of which was originally seen as facilitating an egalitarian, peer-to-peer sharing economy, is not necessarily neutral and apolitical. Digital ledgers are part of the new digital modes of record-keeping that have emerged alongside increasing financialization of real property markets. Enabling aggregation and appropriation of large amounts of commercial data, such technologies can serve as a globalizing and economizing medium and reinforce 鈥渆conomic-like accountability鈥� in human exchange (). As Garrod () suggests, there is a need for more empirical insights into the ways how blockchain-based property relations create new territories of accumulation and resistance, and intersect with existing legal and political systems.

Recent critical accounts of the infrastructures of the internet have called our attention at the ongoing production of layered invisibilities that are intrinsically embedded in colonial and imperial legacies. The fiber-optic cables enabling global internet connections were often laid over the routes of earlier telegraph and railroad lines (). Marked by violence towards indigenous populations and racial labor regimes, infrastructures such as colonial rail networks in North America served as a 鈥渧ehicle of domination鈥� (). The layering of digital networks amidst imperial legacies is also visible in the rapidly expanding digital data storage centers鈥攐ften located in colder parts of the world to cut energy costs. Johnson () has shown how the data centers in Iceland render local communities marginalized 鈥渋nfrastructural in-betweens.鈥� Such connective nodes are not 鈥渘eutral relays鈥� in the flows of global connectivity, but reproduce territories of fragmented power and uneven participation. To bring more visibility to these processes, Amoore (2018) highlights the need to study how data is mobilized for control and surveillance by new technologies such as cloud-computing, which through its correlative calculus, is rendering political uncertainty seemingly tractable and actionable.

I suggest that blockchain-based digitalization of land records should be viewed within a broader framework of land tenure formalization in the Global South, where land titling has been advocated as enabling economic development by turning land into tradable asset and a source of credit. Contrary to the expectations of the proponents of neoliberal land reforms, recent land titling initiatives in Africa and Latin America have fueled speculative investment and land concentration. Many communities in the Global South follow local, alternative rules of property, where land is held under customary tenure and managed as part of a complex system of obligations and debts within a broader kin or territorial group. Reforms that introduce exclusive land rights may exacerbate political conflicts especially in unstable and transitional settings (). Instead of viewing the mobility of assets in the economy as a function of the degree of abstraction as assumed by proponents of private land titles, more attention should be on the techniques that are used to manage these at a distance, which often favor the more powerful, suggests Mitchell ().

鈥淩ecombinant鈥� infrastructures

The growing dislocation of land from the social and temporal embeddedness of its everyday uses has been part of the historical evolvement of land title qualification procedures (see ). The abstraction of human-land relationship has become even more pronounced with the rise of digital land registries. High-tech title registries render more visible the gap between registry records and lived experience, and transfers from paper-based ledgers to digital ones often highlight the need for human mediators with local knowledge (). Even after the transfer, intermediaries are likely to remain an important part of the new infrastructures. Blockchain-based land recordation has been explored in Ghana鈥攁 country that could become illustrative of such dynamic. Much of the rural land in Ghana is unrecorded and many city dwellers live in informal settlements. Title registration is slow and costly, hampered by the lack of written title documents to solve overlapping ownership claims. Existing documentation about landholdings remains fractured and uneven, with many holdings governed by oral agreements. The processes of land allocation in many areas of the country remain governed by local authorities鈥攃hiefs鈥攚hose role has only grown through intricate partnerships with the formal administrative sector. Despite the decentralization reforms of the 1980s, 鈥渕odern鈥� and 鈥渢raditional鈥� forms of governance continue to intermingle, with land serving as a source for political power for local administrators (). Ghanaian chiefs provided inspiration for the World Bank in the revival movement of the 鈥渢raditional authorities鈥� in Africa鈥檚 governance during the structural adjustment era of the 1980s-90s. Through pursuing a dual agenda of promoting economic development and strengthening traditional authority, the chiefs blurred the boundaries between private entrepreneurs, customary office holders, and representatives of the state.

Digital registry platforms could deepen inequalities by introducing new layers of intermediation and creating parallel institutions. The new digital infrastructures in Ghana would incorporate elements from other infrastructural modalities and temporalities鈥攄efined by the histories and regional variety of the country鈥檚 land tenure institutions and colonial as well as neoliberal policy initiatives. This highlights the importance of viewing blockchain registries as part of a broader infrastructural configuration that brings into contact the electronic and digital with paper deed registries, oral use claims and narratives about land ownership, and the 鈥減eopled infrastructures鈥� of customary authorities overseeing land allocation.

Another case of transitioning to blockchain registry is post-socialist Georgia, where a somewhat different picture emerges. Blockchain-based registry can be there, as well, viewed as part of longer-standing land governance reforms. In this former Soviet republic, large-scale collective and state-owned farms prevailed during the socialist period. Land privatization took place in the 1990s, with a digital registry established with support from the World Bank and other development actors. To enhance transparency and resilience of the database, Georgia鈥檚 government turned to the blockchain technology, developing the first national blockchain-based land titling initiative globally. The 鈥渂lockchain layer鈥� was thus added to an already existing IT infrastructure of the database (). Strong popular sentiments about the need to address the post-socialist environments of normative confusion may have contributed to the demand for novel technological solutions. Georgia鈥檚 centuries-long history of foreign invasions had undermined public trust in government institutions, and deepened external security concerns.

In these two cases, blockchain narratives convey different aspirational promises. In Ghana, the main goals of the planned blockchain registry are eliminating the pervasive informality of land rights and improving the functioning of land markets under growing land scarcity and rural commercialization. This would also entail the conversion of customary rights鈥攆requently unrecorded and with important group-based entitlements鈥攊nto formal, private land rights. It is not clear, however, that this promise of land tenure formalization through blockchain technology would resonate with most of the population, as it would entail transformations in existing patterns of property access. Blockchain land registry in Georgia aims to empower a new post-socialist collectivity and restore public trust in the government after a regime transition that has upended existing property rights and land use patterns. Land restitution and distribution reforms have fueled normative ambiguities in the countryside. The promise of blockchain is focused on restoring public trust after transition-era upheavals and external security concerns.

In Ghana as well as post-socialist Georgia, the new technologies operate in an environment where land access has been shaped by the legacies of colonial extraction. In such settings, landholdings may feature as 鈥渞ecombinant property鈥� that is defined and accessed by more than one set of standards and combines elements of public and private property (; Dorondel, Rodima-Taylor and Rusu, forthcoming). Blockchain-based land management in such contexts can be guided by a formalistic and top-down view of land tenure, without enough attention to the actual complexities of formalizing and digitalizing land rights. Blockchain is an emerging technology that can create an illusion of enhanced participation and transparency, while also potentially leading to a growing convergence of plural ownership and use rights, and centralized management of land in conditions where statutory law does not adequately represent many of the land users.

Ambiguous futurities

While the role of the government remains central in these initiatives, novel synergies emerge with the private sector. Drawing on platform intermediation, the developing oligopolies in the emerging technology space can intensify concerns around data privacy and ownership, and reinforce exclusions and divides (see ). New digital technologies operate in complex infrastructural environments where they interact with diverse human, material and normative elements (). Particularly in the Global South, gaps in physical infrastructures are often bridged by the peopled element of social networks and a variety of local gatekeepers. Many of such intermediaries, as well as much of the rural population in countries like Ghana, may lack access to the technology or steady electricity supply to be able to meaningfully participate in such systems 鈥� further expanding the digital divide.

Illuminating the intermingling of the human and the material, political and aesthetic, infrastructures present a promising site for empirical research of contemporary capitalisms, contend Anand, Gupta and Appel (). Infrastructures have originally emerged as a technology of the developmental state, and the modernist depolitization has heightened their role in fostering social exclusion and subjugation. can be simultaneously embedded in different temporalities, however, defined by local histories and the heterogeneous rhythms of contemporary global capital (Ibid.). Blockchain databases are laid on top of existing knowledge and material networks, involving newer and older record-keeping devices and stakeholders from formal and informal sectors. The abstraction of blockchain as advanced in its promissory narratives may obscure the deeply complex layering of formal and informal, institutionalized and grassroots texture of property rights. As the country cases indicated, instead of serving as a panacea for fuzzy title registries, blockchain links into existing dilemmas of property rights and tensions between their individual and collective dimensions.

Reminding us that technologies are metaphors as well as technical objects, Larkin () calls attention to the ways that the aesthetics of infrastructures bring forth a political force and enable people to contest authority. Infrastructures can evoke and make visible ideas that are of central ethical concern at a particular moment鈥攕uch as the transparency and immutability of blockchain registries in the environments of normative plurality, confusion and insecurity. The aesthetic form of the blockchain registry may signify a desire to 鈥渓ock away鈥� debates and contestations over property claims through the production of a 鈥渢rustless鈥� transparency鈥攚hile at the same time, paradoxically, rendering the infrastructures available to broader political debate around their incomplete or unrealizable materializations.

is a social anthropologist, and researcher and lecturer at the African Studies Center of Boston University. Her research interests include financial inclusion, human economies, infrastructures, and land.聽 You can read more on these topics in her recent 鈥淒igitalizing Land Administration鈥� that was published in Geoforum. She tweets at .

Photo: Farm plot in Tanzania, East Africa. By Daivi Rodima-Taylor.

This blog post was originally published on the India-China Institute/The New School’s .

COVID-19 has exacerbated the gendered impact of care work globally, but lessons can be learned from countries like China that have relied on community organizations for solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a severe care crisis throughout the world. The measures to contain the infection 鈥� lockdown, social distancing, quarantine 鈥� severely disrupted activities crucial to the basic functioning of society from cooking to cleaning, childcare, elder care and more. The experience of China shows the critical role of the community in providing essential services.

Like in many other countries, women in China assume disproportionately more care responsibilities than men. With the care crisis intensified by the pandemic, women from different socioeconomic backgrounds were all significantly affected. Urban women mostly saw themselves shouldering more household chores when hiring domestic workers or seeking extra help from family members became impossible or difficult during the lockdown. As most female migrant workers are employed in the precarious informal sector, they had to endure job losses and economic hardship, in addition to extra childcare and household chores. Female healthcare professionals risked their health working on the frontline while having to bear the added mental stress of possibly carrying the virus and spreading it to family members.

Community Workers in China Helping with Household Information Registration. By .

Facing such a severe crisis, the neighborhood communities which have always been part of the social infrastructure, all of a sudden stood out to be focal points of care service provision. The term 鈥渃ommunity鈥� in China today refers to residential neighborhoods in urban areas and villages in rural area. Its rise can be traced back to the withering of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) during the late 1980s. Prior to the 1980s, SOEs were not only the physical sites for production, but also served as the employment-based social infrastructure, providing free or affordable social reproduction services, including on-site childcare, schooling, and healthcare services. Following the privatization of the SOEs and the collapse of the employment-based social infrastructure, the government launched the 鈥渃ommunity building鈥� project in the hope that they could serve as a middle ground to partly address the large-scale social problems emerging from the rapid social transformation, care responsibilities were shoveled back to families all at once.

Community Workers in China Helping with Household Information Registration. By .

Against this backdrop, the neighborhood communities were able to integrate both central state and locally-mobilized resources. With years of management experiences working alongside the local neighborhoods, the formally employed neighborhood community staff were able to adjust to the new demands arising from the pandemic swiftly. As a result, throughout the urban and rural sectors, these neighborhood communities not only ensured provision of basic necessities when human mobility was restricted but also facilitated quarantine practices in a way that largely relieved family members from assuming extra care responsibilities.

During the Wuhan lockdown, neighborhood community councils were responsible for disseminating virus-control medical advice as well as delivering food and medicine to every household, so unnecessary movement of people could be minimized. By doing so, community workers and volunteers took up a large portion of household chores (i.e. grocery and medicines shopping) and helped reduce stress imposed upon individual households. In contrast, we see photos of people holding shopping carts outside the grocery stores waiting for hours to get in at the beginning of the pandemic in the US and many other countries, a practice that is both risky health-wise and inefficient time-wise.

Neighborhood-based community organizations also helped with coordinating health screening and contact tracing, which is crucial in containing the virus. Community workers and volunteers, taking advantage of their familiarity with local neighborhood, were able to keep close contact with families 鈥� effectively screen febrile patients 鈥� and transfer them to quarantine sites for medical observation or to fever clinics for diagnosis. In Wuhan, community clinics and public health centers also provided care to affected patients with severe symptoms, relieving the pressure from hospitals during the early lockdown, when resources were limited. Additionally, they took the responsibility of providing psychological comfort to neighborhood residents.

Community Workers in China Deliver Groceries, Masks, and Medicine. By .

In places like Shanghai where all cases were imported, all 246 community clinics remained open during the lockdown to guarantee the access of unaffected patients to basic healthcare services. For people coming back to China via international flights, the community also took the lead in ensuring safety through implementing protocols such as airport pick-ups to ensure proper quarantine measures. The entire process is as follows: travelers arriving from abroad were picked up from the airport via designated transportation, usually accompanied by two people from the community council, one doctor from the community clinic, and one public security worker. This four-person group would first send arriving passengers for testing, then to hotels while waiting for the results, and finally for home-quarantine if the results were clear. They also established close contact with the people during the fourteen-day home-quarantine, monitoring their health conditions while providing needed assistance, making it feasible for the arrivals to stay housebound. Family members were largely relieved from all responsibilities throughout the process which bore health risks. This procedure was particularly helpful to family members who are immunocompromised or suffering from pre-exiting conditions, who would be at an increased risk if they had to have direct contact with people that had recently traveled.

It is worth noting that China is not the only country utilizing community organizations to enforce and coordinate isolation and quarantine operations, which have proven to be the most crucial step in stopping the spread of the virus.

In Venezuela, for instance, communes work as part of the community infrastructure and played crucial roles in imparting knowledge on COVID-19 prevention and coordinating quarantines. Commune doctors had gathered information on individual households prior to the pandemic, which helped them to quickly identify the most vulnerable members with extra physical and psychological needs. Before the pandemic even hit Venezuela, doctors had already started to make house-to-house visits to inform residents about the nature of the virus and ways to avoid catching it. Such preventative methods are labor-intensive and costly time-wise, yet in the context of a pandemic, it has proven to be an extremely prescient method that helps to save an immense amount of resources in the treatment stage.

The case of the state of Kerala in India is also exemplary. Its cooperatives, as part of the institutional structure, not only effectively facilitated quarantine and contact tracing as in the case of Venezuela, but some even assumed essential production functions such as aiding in mask and sanitizer production to support the prevention of virus spread.

Of course, not every country or region is equipped with pre-existing community infrastructure in place like China, Venezuela, or Kerala. But that doesn鈥檛 mean the importance of community-level organizations can be ignored as the pandemic unfolds. Taiwan, for instance, has struggled to mobilize limited public resources to provide ad hoc support at the community level. In addition to applying technology (i.e. big data and cell phone signals) for contact-tracing and quarantine monitoring, borough chiefs (the lowest-level elected officials) were made to check on people daily during the quarantine. They were also tasked with assisting people with grocery shopping and occasionally providing psychological comfort. With a small population and only imported cases to face, Taiwan鈥檚 ad hoc community-level services proved to be extremely effective in enforcing quarantine, although borough chiefs and other temporarily mobilized staffs were  induced by the pandemic.

All the above-mentioned cases suggest that, it is necessary to institutionalize the community-level organizations as part of the social infrastructure to guarantee the delivery of essential care services. Just like public transportation needs physical infrastructure (i.e. railroad and subways) as its platform to carry out its services, care services, along with other social services (i.e. education and medical services), also need social infrastructure to facilitate their delivery to the recipients.

In our understanding, community should act as a platform to mobilize state as well as local resources, while also developing its potential to provide decent jobs and promote long-term human development. This implication is valid for the current pandemic-ridden world, and particularly for the Global South.

From the economic perspective, countries in the Global South have abundant labor resources, which is conducive to the labor-intensive nature of care work. With limited public resources, it is crucial to determine where and how to invest to bring about the best possible outcome for the society. In this sense, employing the relatively less costly labor resources into the building of a universally accessible, community-centered social infrastructure for care provision is feasible cost-wise in the short run. When care services become universally accessible, it will also foster a healthy cycle of social reproduction, which could improve labor productivity and contribute to the development of the economy in the long run.

Another significant aspect of implementing care-work concerns large-scale geographic and socioeconomic dispersion in Global South countries. Some communities are still largely agrarian, so urban community management experiences will not be universally applicable. This makes specific local knowledge extremely important in the effective provision of care services in residential neighborhoods across different regions. Thus, community-based organizations with trained local leaders will be in an advantageous position in terms of understanding the local conditions and providing the most locally-targeted support, as compared with top-down state policies or NGOs funded through foreign sources.

Although it is important that local communities have their autonomy in deciding priorities and allocating resources, it is also crucial not to overemphasize autonomy to the extent of promoting localism, allowing only spontaneously established communities to exist, or by excluding any form of state involvement in the community building initiatives. This is because, among all, countries in the Global South are inflicted with uneven distribution of human and material resources across regions, and even more so in local neighborhoods. Leaving local neighborhoods alone to mobilize resources for the building of long-standing community organizations will only lead to further polarization, with the best services available to communities endowed with human and financial resources in the first place. In this case, only a consistent and non-exclusive institutional support of resources (such as in the form of state partnership) can alleviate existing inequality.

To conclude, the COVID-19 induced care crisis and its gendered impact suggests that privatized and family-based care provision are too institutionally weak to fight against a crisis at the scale of a pandemic. Like China, most Global South countries adopting the neoliberal type of market reform have experienced privatization of public service sectors in the past few decades, which have contributed to the current care crisis. The difference lies in that in China, both the institutional memory and physical infrastructure for a public option of care provision still remain, and so they can be utilized to a great extent in the time of crisis. In this sense, China鈥檚 history of dismantling of SOE-based public care services and the social crisis it brought about, as well as its heavy reliance on community organizations in the current pandemic, should be important lessons for other countries to contemplate long-term solutions to address the care crisis that will almost certainly outlive the current pandemic.

Ying Chen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School as well as Faculty Affiliate at the India China Institute. Her research areas include political economy, ecological economics and development economics. She tweets at .

This blog post was originally published on the India-China Institute/The New School’s . It is based on the article coauthored by  (Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kanas City, lizhon@umkc.edu),  (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, yang.zhan@polyu.edu.hk) and Ying Chen (Assistant Professor of Economics at The New School, yingc@newschool.edu), currently under review. For detailed data and reference, please contact the authors to request the full paper.

by CHENG Cong, CHEN Hanfei, The RedNet, JIANG Nan, January 29, 2020. by WU Yongkui, The Southern Daily, April 16, 2020. by Zou Juan, The Paper, February 24, 2020 by ZHOU Guiqing, February 29, 2020, The Dongguan Daily

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.

N’Djamena facing its Cameroonian twin Kouss茅rie. Open Street Map

Unlike other cities in Chad, N鈥橠jamena, a city of 1 million facing Cameroon, in the Centre-West of the country has extensive groundwater reserves. Yet, the supply network is patchy and covers only limited portions of the urban area; a situation comparable to numerous , where networks have been multifarious and fragmented since colonial times. The Soci茅t茅 Tchadienne des Eaux (STE), Chad鈥檚 national public water company, manages the official pipe network that barely exceeds 200 kilometres, although it has been expanded . The patchy and poorly managed water network leads to the emergence of multiple coexisting practices of supplying water, a striking feature of many cities across the Global South as explored by scholarly research on (ASD). In N鈥橠jamena supply schemes may rest on local solutions offered by costly boreholes or more affordable handpumps, directly, or indirectly through deliveries from water porters and vendors. Porters are often based near a water tower equipped with a tap from where they refill and rest in between deliveries. This shapes a reticular, local supply economy centred around a 肠补谤谤茅 (block), a market or a handful of streets. N鈥橠jamenois have to navigate this multiplicity and plan their days bearing in mind the amounts of water they will require for routine or extraordinary usages, where they will find such amounts and how they will channel them. Sometimes end-users opt for a combination of local and networked solutions, adapting supply schemes to various domestic usages, buying some of their water here or there. Households routinely balance between costs (while buying water from a porter is more expensive than tap water, the price to install a tap water connection is too high for many N鈥橠jamenois), water quality (STE water is often seen as healthier than handpumped water, for example) and seasonal availability. Economic pressure due to costs and limited availability intersect with water鈥檚 uneven flows.

In April 2020, President Idriss Deby announced that the state would pay for all water bills for 6 months (this policy ended in October 2020). The which included a 鈥渧ulnerable population solidarity fund鈥�, help with electricity bills and tax cuts. The policy鈥檚 official goal was to ease people鈥檚 economic pressure. But easing economic pressure can also reduce water 鈥減ressure鈥�, the needed force that makes water flow. Indeed, residents reported that this unprecedented move was followed by increased power cuts and water supply pressure drops, since the network struggled to catch up with demand requirements. Investigations undertaken by Tchadinfo journalist Maimouna Mahamat Ousmane in April 2020 capture this: 

Infuriated STE customers claimed that the policy resulted in tap water usually 鈥渁rriving鈥� at 1 or 2am, before being cut around 5am or 6am. Buying water outdoors from vendors or private taps had often become more reliable, they said. But doing so forced some households to reportedly spend 3,000 or 4,000 CFA Francs (4.5-6 euros) daily in a harsh time of drought and Ramadan, a huge amount given that minimum monthly wages are approximately 90,000 francs. Low pressure is a recurring issue that water end-users normally bypass through using compressors, if they can afford it. Yet, residents could not predict that a pandemic would decrease water flow even while water had become officially free. Free water, yes, but also less water across the city. A bitter irony which has aggravated already painful situations.

As elsewhere, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between new, Covid-19-related trends and patterns which are inherent to the everyday hardships in the informal sector. I had to cancel a field trip to N鈥橠jamena in November-December 2020 to investigate how Covid-19 affected the water supply networks but my colleague and research collaborator Saradoum Madj-Yanouba updated me about developments in the field sites where we worked together in 2019. Water porters, fountain managers and end-users mostly reported that the free water policy brokered by the government had no effect on their business. Anyway, people had other pressing worries: the rainy season was hard in 2020 across the whole Sahel strip and formidable rainfalls entailed severe flooding, leading to the complete isolation of entire neighbourhoods in N鈥橠jamena. The rainy season is always a low-point for water trade because roads are flooded and don鈥檛 allow porters to travel around and deliver water properly, compelling households to, for example, send children to walk long distances to collect water. However, 2020 was particularly dreadful. In a , the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) claimed that close to a record 400,000 people had been directly affected by the flooding in 2020 in Chad, including 35,000 in N鈥橠jamena, a number hardly seen before.

In December 2020, Saradoum revisited the Chagoua place 脿 vivre (community square), a dynamic space hosting social and commercial activities, including a water tower, which is managed by neighbourhood associations with the support of the city hall. Baptiste*, 22 years old, the new fountain manager of the water tower, currently works with only three porters and sells very small amounts of water. Arguably, the free water policy enacted by the government facilitated his daily life and business because bills were paid for by the state. However, the policy did nothing to boost the consumption and customers remained very rare. Yes, he didn鈥檛 have to pay for water but his customers did. Besides, lockdown effects made their access to water even more difficult as customers weren鈥檛 really allowed to visit the premises of the community square to buy water.

Water porters refilling up at the Boutalbagar market water tower. Photograph by the author

Water tower by the Chagoua community square. Photograph by the author

The Chagoua community square, hosting neighbourhood activities. Photograph by the author

Hence, empirical evidence suggests that the policy failed assisting those in most need. In fact, many respondents like water workers in the Boutalbagar market argued that it favoured the rich connected to the official STE network who could enjoy a private tap water supply in the comfort of their home. They were more likely to be able to afford water through the continuing crisis and enjoy the benefits of reduced prices. Obviously, cutting water prices or making it free cannot succeed if end-users don鈥檛 have access to it anyway. Public authorities would need to reckon and act upon existing pressures, botheconomic and hydraulic ones. Policies directed toward poor communities could be more effective with an emphasis on extending supplies and strengthening networks; tasks even more critical and important during a pandemic.  

*Interviewee鈥檚 name has been changed to preserve anonymity

Isma毛l Maazaz is a PhD candidate at the Centre of African Studies of the University of Edinburgh. He is currently writing up his dissertation on water politics in N鈥橠jamena, Chad. Header image: End-users collecting water from a hanpump in Paris Congo neighbourhood, N鈥橠jamena. Photograph by the author

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.

The Belgrade-Budapest Railway is a microcosm of a paradigm shift in the constitution of global capitalism. Any system of capital accumulation requires a certain justificatory in order to mobilise the social groups necessary for its continued reproduction. In advanced capitalist societies, the global financial crisis has engendered a crisis of liberal capitalism, providing a rupture for Chinese state capital to penetrate. It is against this backdrop that the external face of regime legitimacy in Serbia, which was derived from the EU and its associated imaginaries of democracy and free market competition, has been given a material and discursive pretext to turn toward China.

Serbia is what Florian Bieber characterises as a where external legitimacy, manifest in clear government support for EU accession if not actual dialogue, EU direct financial assistance, and EU-bilateral ties, which have been on show during election campaigns, matters for regime endurance. Yet, as Bieber argues, the EU has provided limited support for democratisation, propping up regimes that base their external legitimacy more on the stability that such external legitimacy provides rather than meaningful democratic reform, resulting in what has been characterised as 鈥樷��.

Somewhat ironically, Chinese state capital feeds the very stabilitocracy that was strengthened by the EU in the first place, to the extent that it is eroding what limited constraints EU legitimacy might place on the authoritarian tendencies of the incumbent Serbian President Vucic鈥檚 government. We see this played out in the construction sector where infrastructure investment has been a major economic driver. In the post-crisis period where infrastructural investment in the Western Balkans has from pre-crisis levels of 27% to below 22% annual GDP, Vucic has made public investment a cornerstone of his economic policy, committing to fund new public works.

The realisation of the Belgrade-Budapest Railway, along with other Chinese construction projects, have justified the unimpeded introduction of lex specialis laws to accelerate the process of democratic backsliding, superseding what limited restraint on authoritarianism there is, that the external legitimacy of the EU may provide. In this respect, the between China and Serbia has been a landmark treaty. The treaty ties financing to construction, clearing the need for pre-selection and open tender of the main contractor, allowing Chinese firms to bypass the hurdle of competitive pre-selection where they would have to compete against European firms. Moreover, the treaty stipulates that contractor and sub-contractor selection procedures be outlined in the (confidential) commercial contract, thus protecting the allocation of loan funds from public scrutiny. In February 2020, the Serbian government introduced new laws and amendments concerning the implementation of public infrastructure works, in particular a law on highway and railway infrastructure that authorises the state to expedite the typically complex land expropriations necessary on public works going forward, including all pipeline projects slated for 2021 and 2022. Such legal reforms are undertaken with the rationale of 鈥榩ublic interest鈥�, yet they empower the state at the cost of democratic due process, for instance in the relocation of Roma settlements.

The railway, underpinned by the treaty, also signifies the exportation of a Chinese state capital accumulation logic. The treaty empowers any state entity, including banks and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), to act as representatives of China in negotiations with the investor, the Serbian government or SOE. Based on the my own analysis, as of October 2020, there are five active Chinese EPCF (Engineering, Procurement, Construction, Finance) public infrastructure projects worth an estimated EUR 2.075 billion in value, including the Belgrade-Budapest Railway. In all cases they are majority financed by a sovereign-guaranteed China Exim loan and undertaken by Chinese SOEs.

In the realm of labour, the treaty grants immigration clearance exceptions for construction staff, and more generally casts a legal grey area exempting Chinese labour workers from Serbian labour law. Based on recent fieldwork conducted in Serbia, I observed informal, highly flexible, private Chinese migrant labour to underpin the Belgrade-Budapest Railway that conforms to exploitative labour dynamics prevalent in state-coordinated projects in China and . The labour sub-contracting is highly discretionary and unstandardized across the construction, despite the fact that final responsibility for delivery of the overall project lies with the main contractor consortium of China Railways International and Chinese Communications Construction Company. One sub-contractor to the Belgrade-Stara Pazova section of the railway who operates out of North-East China pays out a one-time annual lump-sum to workers who are employed in the absence of employment contracts, whereas another sub-contractor operating out of Shaanxi province, pays workers monthly. In all cases, workers work 10-hour days, 7 days a week.

The expansion of Chinese state capital into Serbia is prefaced by a fundamental shift in the organisation of capital accumulation at the global level, to the effect that it is stabilising stabilitocracy in Serbia and facilitating the spread of Chinese accumulation logics abroad. Projects like the Belgrade-Budapest Railway exemplify how, beneath the veneer of diplomatic cooperation, their realisation precedes at once a strengthened state, an authoritarian state, and an exploitative state.

Imogen T. Liu is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University where her research focuses on the transnationalization of state capital. She tweets at .

This article is based on research made possible with support from the European Cooperation in Science and Technology , and the European Research Council supported project .