Tag Archives: World Bank

Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter interviews Michael Hudson. Transcript.Naked CapitalismMichael Hudson Discusses the IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness Yves Smith

Press TV 26-12-2018 The video and some notes of my recent interview in Press TV News on the recent resignation of the World Bank president Jim Yong Kim follows. Kim – an Obama administration nominee – departs the World Bank stating that he had an unexpected offer to join a private firm focusing on investment in climate change and infrastructure in developing economies. The rumoured reason of the resignation is differences with the Trump administration over climate change. However, Kim...

I am doing some work on the way technology can be chosen to maximise employment in the pursuit of advancing general well-being. This is in the context of some work I am doing on advancing what is known as ‘relative pro-poor growth’ strategies in Africa via employment creation programs and draws on my earlier work in South Africa on the Expanded Public Works Program. In the current work, I have been assessing ways in which the Labour Intensive Public Works program in Ghana has been deployed...

India has for more than a decade had a rural jobs guarantee program in place, for unskilled workers. If India can succeed in designing and implementing such a policy, why can’t the US? Economist Jayati Ghosh wrote this assessment of The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 (MGNREGA) in The Guardian in 2015: Naked CapitalismWhat India Can Teach the US About a Federal Job GuaranteeJerri-Lynn Scofield

Australia is currently being shocked on a daily basis with the revelations in our Royal Commission on Banking, which show that our financial services sector (banks, insurance companies, financial planning, etc) is deeply corrupt, with criminal behaviour clearly rife. Hopefully, many of the top executives and board members of these firms will be prosecuted and do time. Another ‘bank’ that has totally lost any sense of moral compass, not to mention effectiveness, is the World Bank. Its...

Reminder whose interests international institutions represent and open what basis. This time it's the World Bank, but it includes the IMF, Bank of International Settlements, and other institutions upholding market-centric interpretation of the Washington Consensus that favors "capital formation" as the foundation for growth. Workers are just another commodity priced in the market based on their monetary worth as the market determines the value of the labor power they offer. The World Bank...

Writing a paper on Latin America. Nothing particularly relevant to report. I was just checking the date. Many sources to get the data. I suggest both the World Bank Development Indicators and the Conference Board Total Economic Database. At any rate, below GDP growth from the Golden Age (after the Korean War and up to Debt crisis) to the Neoliberal Era (starting in the 1990s). Clearly growth has been more volatile and at lower rates. So much for the notion that Neoliberalism works.

In our new book Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, 2017) – Thomas Fazi and I argue that a new progressive agenda would see the abolition of the IMF and the World Bank and the creation of a new multilateral institution that is entrusted with ensuring poor nations can access necessary funds to prevent their societies collapsing. This organisation would not be a bulwark for inflicting neoliberal policies on the poorer nations,...

Maintaining the core-periphery dichotomy of imperialism and colonialism under neoliberalism, Neo-imperialism, and neocolonialism. The Political Economy of DevelopmentThe ‘organised hypocrisy’ of US industrial policyNick Johnson

Soon after the 2015 federal election, Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau affirmed that Canada was back as a “compassionate and constructive voice in the world” after a decade of Conservative governments. One of the most important means by which any industrialized country interacts with the developing world is via the amount, composition and effectiveness of its foreign aid, which can help boost human and economic development, mitigate humanitarian crises and reduce environmental...