Half a century after the 1970s’ stagflation, economies are contracting as prices rise again. “Surging energy and food prices heighten the risk of a prolonged period of global stagflation.”
Read the article of Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
What we call the past is just that: It is what happened at some point before now. Once it occurs, the past is gone forever –beyond repeating, beyond reliving, beyond replicating. It is recoverable only by the evidence, almost never complete, that it leaves behind; and that evidence must be and is interpreted by individual humans, historians principally, all of whom differ in all sorts of ways. Distinct from the actual past are the narratives and analyses that historians offer us about earlier times. That is what we have been taught to call ‘history’, i.e., what most of us make of the forever-gone past. Indeed, history is created by the application of human thought and imagination to what is left behind…
Only recently have conventional historians been confronted by others with which Herodotus was more comfortable —those coming from social and cultural (and human rights) history, through whom the history of women, slaves, laboring people, African Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others whose rights have been and are violated have been given greatly enlarged attention. This marks the emergence of all people as historical subjects not avoiding public and political historical frictions.
Read Claudio Schuftan’s article
On how the war in Ukraine is a war against Europe and its ‘soft’ values … and why the class struggle remains important
Read the article of Slavoj Zizek
Financial opacity and offshore hidden wealth have become a major economic and political problem. Tax havens continue to exist and provide financial secrecy services that allow the richest individuals in the world to hide their wealth from national tax authorities. Implementing a Global Asset Registry could help tax authorities to identify, record and tax all wealth, regardless of where it is held. It would also be a critical tool in efforts to recover stolen assets of countries suffering from widespread corruption.
Read the Policy Brief of the South Center
The London-based human rights organization, Amnesty International (AI), says protesters across the globe are facing a potent mix of pushbacks, with a growing number of laws and other measures to restrict the right to protest; the misuse of force, the expansion of unlawful mass and targeted surveillance; internet shutdowns and online censorship; and abuse and stigmatization.
AI says the right to protest is “under unprecedented and growing threat across all regions of the world”, as the organization launched a new global campaign to confront states’ widening and intensifying efforts to erode this fundamental human right.
Read the article by Thalif Deen
The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, confessed to being “very well aware of the impact” (of a rate rise, and the Bank’s forecast of a recession) on what he euphemistically called “the least well-off”.
Impoverishing the 99 % cannot tackle inflation …
Read Ann Pettifor’s article
On 7 July 2022, the Human Rights Council (HRC) adopted without a vote Resolution A/HRC/50/L.13/Rev.1 (hereinafter ‘the Resolution’) on “Access to medicines, vaccines and other health products in the context of the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health”.[1] The Resolution was proposed by a group of developing countries (Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Senegal, South Africa and Thailand). It highlights the unequal access to vaccines and other medical technologies during COVID-19 and beyond, recalling the various resolutions and decisions on the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, as well as the 2022 decisions which stressed the “need for ensuring equitable, affordable, timely and universal access for all countries to vaccines in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic”.[2] Importantly, it recalls the various human rights implications resulting from the lack of affordable and equitable access to such products, particularly for the global South, women and girls, and other marginalized communities.
Read the South Center’s Brief
This note builds on previous collaboration between the World Bank Group and UNICEF to estimate the global extent of
child poverty. We estimate that in 2017, 17.5 percent of children in the world (or 356 million) younger than 18 years lived on less than $1.90 PPP per day, as opposed to 7.9 percent of adults ages 18 and above. The poverty rate of children at the $3.20 and $5.50 lines were 41.5 and 66.7 percent, respectively. The number of children living in extreme poverty declined by approximately 29 million between 2013 and 2017. In 2017, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for two thirds of extremely poor children, and South Asia another 18 percent. These estimates are based on the Global Monitoring Database (GMD) of household surveys compiled in Spring 2020 and consists of surveys from 149 countries that are also official World Bank poverty estimates. Because the estimates pertain to 2017, they do not consider the adverse economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read the Policy Brief
On the multidimensionality of poverty and inequality
It sounds so very reasonable to look at all the different dimensions of poverty and inequality. But is it? Always? Is poverty, in every market economy, not mainly a question of lack of money? Is inequality of income and wealth not the most important aspect of all sorts of differences and discriminations?
Read the article by Francine Mestrum
(also available in French and Spanish)
Global Policy Watch and Social Watch published a policy brief on the importance of social protection for reducing inequality within and between countries
Read the document
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