Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s Blog

The Covid-19 crisis has had several unexpected effects, including renewed attention to food security concerns. Earlier understandings of food security in terms of production self-sufficiency have given way to importing supplies since late 20th century promotion of trade liberalization. Transnational food business Disruption of transnational food supply chains and the devastation of many vulnerable livelihoods by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have revived interest in earlier understandings of food self-sufficiency. But, even if successful, winding back policy will not address more recently recognized food challenges such as malnutrition and safety. All too many food researchers have been successfully compromised,…

Seventy-five years ago, on 26 June 1945, before the Japanese surrender ending the Second World War, fifty nations gathered at San Francisco’s Opera House to sign the United Nations (UN) Charter. UN Charter Nations pledged “to practice tolerance and live together in peace …, and to ensure … that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples”. They sought “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, … and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and…

Katharina Pistor’s recent book, The Code of Capital: How the law creates wealth and inequality shows how law has been crucial to the creation of capital, and how capital continues to survive, evolve and enhance its ability to ‘make money’, or secure wealth legally, i.e., through the law. Legal coding makes capital In her magnum opus, the Columbia Law School professor explains how legal systems create capital and how law enables wealth creation through what she terms ‘legal coding’. Notions of property and property rights have changed over the ages, reflecting and redefining social and economic relations more generally. Pistor sees ‘legal…

Over the course of his presidency, US President Donald Trump’s racism has become more evident with more leaks of his private remarks, which he has been generally quick to deny, qualify and explain away. Despite his thinly disguised contempt for women, ‘non-white’ ethnic minorities, and most foreigners, unsurprisingly, he is respectful of power and privilege, especially when they may help him. Trump’s version of ‘kiss up, kick down’. “Least racist person in the world” Unsurprisingly, Trump has claimed he is the least racist person in the world. Unsurprisingly too, his record suggests otherwise. Trump has frequently created controversies with racially charged…

How often have you heard someone lamenting or even condemning inequality in society, concluding with an appeal to meritocracy? We like to think that if only the deserving, the smart ones, those we deem competent or capable, often meaning the ones who are more like us, were in charge, things would be better, or just fine. Meritocracy’s appeal Since the 1960s, many institutions, the world over, have embraced the notion of meritocracy. With post-Cold War neoliberal ideologies enabling growing wealth concentration, the rich, the privileged and their apologists invoke variants of ‘meritocracy’ to legitimize economic inequality. Instead, corporations and other…

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly impacted most economies in the world. Its full impacts will not be felt, let alone measured, until it runs its course. Many countries are still struggling to contain contagion, while the costs on both lives and livelihoods will undoubtedly have long-term repercussions. Back to the future? The pandemic has exposed economic vulnerabilities building up for decades, especially since the counter-revolution, against Keynesian and development economics in the 1980s, gathered pace with transnational corporation-led privatization, liberalization and globalization. As the world become more interdependent via trade, finance and communications, inequality and economic insecurity have waxed and…

Even before Covid-19, the world was facing a care crisis. The plight of often neglected, under-appreciated, under-protected and poorly equipped ‘frontline’ health personnel working to contain the pandemic has drawn attention to the tip of the care crisis iceberg. Rising care work burden Ageing populations as well as cuts to public services and social protection were making matters worse, increasing the burden on carers, or care givers/providers, regardless of their employment status. Elderly people need long-term care as they age, while existing social arrangements, including government services, remain inadequate and ill prepared. Such demands on caregivers will continue to increase…

As governments the world over struggle to revive their economies after the debilitating lockdowns they imposed following their failure to undertake adequate precautionary containment measures to curb Covid-19 contagion, neoliberal naysayers are already warning against needed deficit financing for relief and recovery. Deficit financing options The range of deficit financing options has changed little since first legitimized by Roosevelt and Keynes in the 1930s and used extensively to finance wartime government spending. First, debt financing has typically involved government borrowing. More recent understandings of sovereign debt stress the implications of the source of borrowing, domestic or external, e.g., Japan’s total…

The world economic contraction so far this year is largely due to measures, especially at the national or local level, to contain or prevent Covid-19 contagion, particularly those restricting business operations, thus reducing economic activity, output, incomes and spending. Lower business and worker incomes have reduced spending, for both consumption and investment, and thus overall or aggregate demand. While there has indeed been much novel ‘financial folly’ in the last decade, responsible for its dreary ‘recovery’, and financial circumstances will retard recovery, the cruel public health dilemma posed by the viral pandemic is surely its immediate cause. To be sure, recent economic…

Indonesia’s founding President Sukarno delivered his annual Independence or National Day address on 17 August 1964 anticipating the forthcoming year as Tahun vivere pericoloso, the ‘year of living dangerously’. 2020 may well be the world’s turn, and not only due to the obvious Covid-19 threat to the world. US as number one With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the US became the world’s sole superpower. Many argue that after abandoning its pre-Second World War isolationism to become the post-war hegemon, the US has needed threats to justify ever rising military spending for…