Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s Blog

Failure to sufficiently accelerate comprehensive efforts to contain COVID-19 contagion has greatly worsened the catastrophe in developing countries. Grossly inadequate financing of relief, recovery and reform efforts has also further set back progress, including sustainable development. Uncertain and unequal recovery After over a year, “Poor countries are facing severe setbacks on their development paths, encumbered by ballooning debts, high risks of default and limited ability to inject desperately needed liquidity”, observed participants at a recent UN Forum. International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief economist, Gita Gopinath, estimates US$9 trillion in economic benefits from adequately accelerating affordable mass vaccination, testing, tracing and treatment at…

Millions of people are expected to die due to delayed and unaffordable access to COVID-19 tests, treatment, personal protective equipment and vaccines. Urgent cooperation is desperately needed to save lives and livelihoods for all. Vaccine apartheid Thus far, rich countries have bought up most available vaccine supplies. By mid-April, rich countries had received more than 87 percent of the more than 700 million vaccine doses dispensed worldwide, while poor countries had received only 0.2 percent. A quarter of the former’s population had been vaccinated compared to one in 500 of the latter’s! By mid-May, less than a twelfth of the world’s population…

Thanks to President Biden, the US now supports a suspension of intellectual property (IP) rights to increase vaccine supplies. However, without vaccine developers sharing tacit technical knowledge for safe vaccine mass production, it will be difficult to rapidly scale up vaccine output. Waiver delayed is waiver denied The CEOs of Pfizer and Astra Zeneca had recently asked the US President to reject the waiver request. Nevertheless, on 5 May, US Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai announced US support for a vaccine waiver. The hope is that many, mainly rich countries will now stop opposing the developing country waiver proposal. The World…

3 May is World Press Freedom Day. This is part of a series of IPS features and opinion editorials focused on media freedom globally. Have you ever heard of a workers’ strike or similar labour action for press freedom? And how long do you think it lasted? A day? A week? A month? And where and when do you think this happened? Workers strike for press freedom Six decades ago, in 1961, Said Zahari, the editor of the Malay language daily, Utusan Melayu, led a strike of journalists and other employees. The protracted strike, in both Malaysia and Singapore today, was…

Producers and consumers seem helpless as food all over the world comes under fast growing corporate control. Such changes have also been worsening environmental collapse, social dislocation and the human condition. Longer term perspective The recent joint report – by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the ETC Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration – is ominous, to say the least. A Long Food Movement, principally authored by Pat Mooney with a team including IPES-Food Director Nick Jacobs, analyses how food systems are likely to evolve over the next quarter century with technological and…

Since the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was launched in 2006, yields have barely risen, while rural poverty remains endemic, and would have increased more if not for out-migration. AGRA was started, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, to double yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farm households while halving food insecurity by 2020. There are no signs of significant productivity and income boosts from promoted commercial seeds and agrochemicals in AGRA’s 13 focus countries. Meanwhile, the number of undernourished in these nations increased by 30%! When will we ever learn? What…

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has urged all governments to support a global minimum corporate tax rate of at least 21%. The US is working with other G20 nations to get other countries to end the “thirty-year race to the bottom on corporate tax rates”. Corporate tax vital For Yellen, “governments [should] have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods and respond to crises, and that all citizens fairly share the burden of financing government”. The Biden administration has unveiled a plan to reverse Trump’s tax cuts and raise US corporate tax rates from 21% to 28%. Crucially, it wants…

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to take an unprecedented human and economic toll, wiping away years of modest and uneven progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Developing countries now need much more support as progress towards the SDGs was ‘not on track’ even before the pandemic. By end-2022, average incomes are expected to be 18% below pre-crisis levels in low-income countries (LICs) and 22% less in emerging and developing countries excluding China – compared to 13% lower for developed economies. These lower incomes will push hundreds of millions into extreme poverty and hunger, surviving on incomes under US$1.90/day. The World Bank estimates…

Illicit financial flows (IFFs) hurt all countries, both developed and developing. But poor countries suffer relatively more, accounting for nearly half the loss of world tax revenue. IFFs refer to cross-border movements of money and other financial assets obtained illegally at source, e.g., by corruption, smuggling, tax evasion, etc. This often involves trade mis-invoicing and transnational corporations’ (TNCs) transfer pricing via ‘creative’ accounting or book-keeping. Staggering revenue losses About US$500–600 billion in corporate tax revenue is lost yearly to TNCs shifting profits to low-, or no-tax ‘havens’. These often involve fictitious ‘paper’ transactions at inflated prices among subsidiaries to ‘move’ profits out of the country where a TNC actually does…

COVID-19 has set back the uneven progress of recent decades, directly causing more than two million deaths. The slowdown, due to the pandemic and policy responses, has pushed hundreds of millions more into poverty, hunger and worse, also deepening many inequalities. Development setbacks The outlook for developing countries is grim, with output losses of 5.7% in 2020. Compared to pre-pandemic trends, the expected 8.1% loss by end-2021 will be much worse than advanced countries dropping 4.7%. COVID-19 has further set back progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As progress was largely ‘not on track’ even before the pandemic, developing…