Tag archive for ‘IMF’
The Case for Public Investment
The fiscal crises now besetting several OECD countries risk replaying the long agony of over-indebtedness in Africa. In Africa the process was directly overseen by the IMF. Its model of debt sustainability implicitly assumed that public investment was entirely unproductive: this was the implication of the absence from the model of any link between public [...]
Competitiveness through Cuts?
A standard piece of textbook economics is that if a country cannot devalue, it must cut real wages to increase labour productivity and make its exports more attractive. Indeed, it is argued quite plausibly that the main reasons for Germany’s successful export performance in the past decade is that real wages have remained flat, despite [...]
Ten Commandments for Fiscal Adjustment in Advanced Economies
The G20 communiqué stresses the difficulty of balancing fiscal stimulus and fiscal consolidation. This column – written by one of the world’s leading macroeconomists, Olivier Blanchard, and his co-author – sums up the research-based policy analysis of the issue. Advanced economies are facing the difficult challenge of implementing fiscal adjustment strategies without undermining a still-fragile [...]
Africa’s Window of Opportunity
Just when Europe’s economic future has deteriorated Africa’s is looking more promising than for many decades. That promise is underpinned by global commodity prices, high despite the world recession, and by years of gradual reforms. The revenues from resource extraction are going to increase massively. This is because Africa is the last frontier for resource [...]
Reforming Global Economic Governance — Towards Bretton Woods III
World economic governance needs to move towards a Bretton Woods III involving effective supervision of all structural imbalances by the IMF, greater resources for the IMF along with fundamental reforms of that institution, and a shift from the dollar as dominant international reserve currency. This requires cooperation between the G3 – the US, China and [...]
After the Financial Market Crisis – A Trade Union Agenda
Now that financial institutions are being subsidised by taxpayers and speculative trading is back to pre-crisis levels, breaking the economic boom-and-bust cycles should become a high priority for the European trade union movement. This needs to be underpinned by broad coalition-building, campaigns and targeted lobby work in member states. Rahm Emanuel, White House chief-of-staff, after [...]
How to Reassure Markets Without Slashing Fiscal Deficits
Having spent the past few months denying reality, Europe’s governments are now facing it in the unpleasant form of a loss of confidence in their bonds. For centuries the standard problem for bond markets has been to distinguish between prudent and imprudent governments. I want to suggest how governments can now restore confidence in a [...]
Open Letter to European Policymakers: The Greek Crisis is a European Crisis and needs European Solutions
Open letter coordinated by the European Trade Union Institute For weeks the attention of the financial markets, media commentators and policymakers has been on the Greek crisis. Yet it has rumbled on. The Greek population is being asked to make painful cuts which will only depress incomes, output and employment further, even as interest rates [...]
What the Doomsayers Haven’t Been Telling You about Greece
The recent battle over healthcare reform in the United States, in which the Obama administration was barely able to pass weak reform, is just further proof of how far the US has fallen behind Europe. Yet all the media has been able to obsess over for the last couple of months is – the Greek [...]
The Eurozone Problem – Learning from Africa
In the debate about Greece and the Eurozone analogies have been drawn with various other currency unions, but the most significant has gone unnoticed. The Franc Zone has been linked to the European currencies for over sixty years. The relationship between the French Treasury and the governments of Francophone Africa displays many of the structural [...]
Assessment System Required to Ensure Aid Makes a Real Difference
How should aid be provided? Aid appears to be at its best when it is designated to finance beneficial projects. If aid finances a school or a health clinic then surely it is useful. Unfortunately, this is often an illusion for the simple reason that such projects may well have been undertaken by the government [...]
The changing Face of Global Governance: between past Strategic Failure and Future Economic Constraints
Until recently, the West has, by and large, determined the rules of the game on the global stage. During the last century, western countries presided over a shift in world power – from control via territory to control via the creation of governance structures created in the post-1945 era. From the United Nations Charter and [...]
