To really end labour shortages, Ankita Anand writes, Europe must transform its contract with the global south.
In an open letter to G20 leaders as they prepared to convene in New Delhi, India for their annual summit, U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) joined economist Jayati Ghosh, Patriotic Millionaires chair Morris Pearl, philanthropist Abigail Disney, and more than 300 others in declaring that “we cannot allow extreme wealth to continue corroding our collective future.”
“Decades of falling taxes on the richest, based on the false promise that the wealth at the top would somehow benefit us all, has contributed to the rise in extreme inequality,” the Tuesday letter states. “Our political choices allow ultra-wealthy individuals to continue to use tax shelters and enjoy preferential treatment to the extent that, in most countries in the world, they pay lower tax rates than ordinary people.”
“At the same time, the world has seldom had more need for the richest to pay,” the letter continues, noting that global extreme poverty rose in 2020 for the first time in more than two decades as Covid-19 threw the world into economic chaos.
This Research Paper reviews Least Developed Countries’ (LDCs) collective progress on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), based on the available data on the indicators for the 169 SDG targets. It makes recommendations for LDCs and other States to consider advancing in relevant UN processes as well as the WTO’s.
LDCs made progress on 28% of the SDGs. This collective progress shows that these countries are far from achieving what were deemed achievable goals in 2015. With respect to trade-related SDGs, LDCs have not made progress on any of the five trade-related SDGs that mention LDCs specifically.
This paper does not delve into the causes of this gap, but it suggests that international cooperation and, particularly, the developed countries’ assistance, has been insufficient to address the needs of a large part of the world population that still lives in poverty and without hope of a better future. However, the Doha Programme of Action (DPoA), a development framework with targets specifically for LDCs -which overlap with SDG targets- appears to dilute several original SDG targets, in particular those in SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals).
Today’s capitalism bears uncomfortable semblance to the Soviet economic system. Three key features I contend, are held in common between the systems. They are:a) central planning
b) the credits, subsidies and protections provided by central banks to failing ‘enterprises’
c) the requisitioning of surpluses and/or the looting of corporate profits and capital gains by powerful apparatchiks/elites.
Read the very interesting article by Ann Pettifor
To mark UN International Equal Pay Day, 18 September, the ITUC is celebrating success stories from trade unions around the world that have campaigned to tackle the gender pay gap.
The share of global wealth that goes to wages has fallen by 13 per cent over the past 40 years, even as the world economy has quadrupled in size. This is largely a result of falling trade union density caused by the long-term erosion of workers’ rights detailed in the ITUC Global Rights Index.
Workers are increasingly forced to take strike action as employers take profits for themselves and shareholders while refusing even modest pay demands.
Instead of supporting working people and their dependents, many governments side with bosses and keep the real value of wages at such low levels that families are struggling to survive. The right to strike was violated in nine out of 10 countries last year.
Read ITUC’s article
After decades of resistance by rich nations, African governments successfully pushed for the United Nations to lead on international tax cooperation. All developing countries and fair-minded governments must rally behind this initiative.
Read Jomo Kwame Sundartam’s article
Major financing for development (FfD) innovations have long been initiated by the UN. Special drawing rights (SDRs), ‘0.7 per cent of national income’ for official development assistance (ODA) and debt relief were all conceived in the UN around half a century ago.
The financialization of recent decades has undermined the mobilization and deployment of adequate financial resources to accelerate sustainable development and address global warming.
During the 1990s, the UN warned against new threats to economic stability. Some were due to volatile private capital flows and speculation, encouraged by deregulated financial markets, enabled by the IMF despite its Articles of Agreement.
By contrast, the UN has insisted on ensuring policy space for more effective development strategies by Member States. It has also urged macroeconomic policies to support long-term growth, technological progress and economic diversification.
The UN Secretariat has also promoted orderly sovereign debt relief. But Member States have long complained IFIs were shirking their mandates to provide financial stability and adequate long-term development finance.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
https://www.ksjomo.org/post/un-financing-appeal-last-hope-for-sdgs-and-climate
The 1944 “Bretton Woods Agreement” gave birth to the new international financial system marked by the centrality of the US dollar which is a crucial pillar of the global power of the United States. Over the past eight decades, the asymmetry of the shrinking US economic weight in the world economy and growing dominant role of the dollar has become more and more glaring. The disadvantages of overreliance on the dollar have been keenly felt, especially by developing countries. The recent moves to weaponize the dollar and the payment clearance system have triggered another wave of reassessment by national states and enterprises of the role of the dollar and led to the hitherto most broad-based de-dollarization process covering from Southeast Asia to Latin America and the Middle East. De-dollarization has been incrementally taking place in different forms and led by BRICS and some commodity exporting countries. However, there are many challenges to meaningful de-dollarization. Overall, de-dollarization efforts, despite important progress, have been limited and partial. There has been progress in reducing overreliance on the dollar through foreign exchange reserve diversification and trade invoicing as evidenced by the decline in the dollar’s share of allocated foreign exchange reserves and the increase of trade invoiced and transacted in currencies other than the dollar. However, on aspects requiring the deep financial market and wide network such as foreign exchange transactions, issuance of debt and payment clearance, the dollar’s share has not suffered a decline. To reform the international financial system, the BRICS in particular should continue to take the lead in furthering the de-dollarization efforts.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) has published an advanced unedited version of a game-changing report. It outlines the options for strengthening the inclusiveness and effectiveness of international tax cooperation and presents three possible roads ahead, all under the auspices of the UN. Eurodad welcomes this truly historic moment in international tax cooperation.
and also read Eurodad’s report on the same topic:
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