Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s Blog

Without any hint of irony, the World Bank's most recent Doing Business Report 2017 promises ‘Equal Opportunity for All'. Bangladesh ranked 176th among 190 economies, below civil war-ravaged Iraq and Syria! Bangladesh even slipped two places from 174 in the 2016 ranking and is three places below its 2015 ranking. Malaysia, too, slipped five places. The Doing Business Report (DBR) 2017 ranked Malaysia at 23, down from 18 in the previous two reports for 2015 and 2016. Incredibly, this had nothing to do with news of the biggest scandal ever in the country's history. Malaysia seems to have slipped because,…

The Malaysian economy is in bad shape, but so is the world economy. Being a very open economy, it is difficult to do better unless Malaysia has an appropriate development and macroeconomic strategy appropriate for our circumstances. This is certainly lacking, but even more importantly, we are going down the wrong track. Take the TPP, which now seems dead in the water, thanks to Trump, and not to our own efforts. The TPP is fraudulent, offering very little in terms of additional growth due to trade liberalization. The purported gains are mainly from strengthening intellectual property rights, mainly in the…

The World Bank's Doing Business Report 2017, subtitled ‘Equal Opportunity for All', continues to mislead despite the many criticisms, including from within, levelled against the Bank's most widely read publication, and Bank management promises of reform for many years. Its Foreword claims, "Evidence from 175 economies reveals that economies with more stringent entry regulations often experience higher levels of income inequality as measured by the Gini index." But what is the evidence base for its strong claims, e.g., that "economies with more business-friendly regulations tend to have lower levels of income inequality"? Closer examination suggests that the "evidence" is actually…

Instead of concerted and sustained efforts for a strong, sustained economic recovery to overcome protracted stagnation, the near policy consensus on fiscal austerity in the G7 and the G20 OECD countries, except for the US and Japan, has dragged down economic recovery in developing countries. After seven years of lackluster economic performance and rising tensions over the Eurozone straightjacket on fiscal stimuli, there are signs of a growing willingness to reconsider earlier policies. While it is not yet clear whether this will lead to significant enough policy changes, this may well led to the long awaited turning point the world…

Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in ostensible free trade agreements (FTAs) and bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have effectively created a powerful, privileged system of protections for foreign investors that undermine national law and institutions. ISDS allows foreign corporations to sue governments for causing them losses due to legal or regulatory changes.A law unto themselvesISDS cases are decided by extrajudicial tribunals composed of three corporate lawyers. Although ISDS has existed for decades, its scope and impact has grown sharply in the last decade. As ISDS has been written into over 3,000 BITs and numerous FTAs, the opportunities for ISDS claims are…

International inequality has grown over recent centuries, especially the last two. Before the Industrial Revolution, between-country inequalities were small, while within-country inequalities accounted for most of overall global income inequality. Now, inter-country income inequalities account for about two-thirds of world inequality with intra-country inequality accounting for a third. Concern about inequality has grown as every major economic, social and political crisis has been preceded by rising inequality. World War II was no exception. Thus, on 10th May 1944, the International Labour Congress adopted the historic Philadelphia Declaration which asserted that "lasting peace can be established only if it is based…

Global income inequality among different regions began to increase about five centuries ago, before accelerating two centuries ago. The data suggest a brief reversal during the Golden Age quarter century after the Second World War, and in the last decade, with higher primary commodity prices once again, and protracted stagnation in much of the North following the 2008-2009 financial crisis. From class to geography Before the Industrial Revolution, between-country inequalities were relatively small, while within-country inequalities accounted for most global income inequality. Inter-country income inequalities now account for about two-thirds of world inequality, with intra-country inequality accounting for the remaining…

Privatization of SOEs has been a cornerstone of the neo-liberal counterrevolution that swept the world from the 1980s following the economic crisis brought about by US Fed's sharp hike in interest rates. Developing countries, seeking aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, often had to commit to privatization as a condition for credit support. The World Bank and the IMF then attributed developing countries' inability to adjust to the external shocks of that time, inter alia, to their import-substituting industrial policy initiatives and the inefficiency of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Hence, their support came with conditions…

From the 1980s, various studies purported to portray the public sector as a cesspool of abuse, inefficiency, incompetence and corruption. Books and articles with pejorative titles such as ‘vampire state’, ‘bureaucrats in business’ and so on thus provided the justification for privatization policies. Despite the caricature and exaggeration, there were always undoubted horror stories which could be cited as supposedly representative examples. But similarly, by way of contrast, other experiences show that SOEs can be run quite efficiently, even on commercial bases, confounding the dire predictions of the prophets of public sector doom. SOE inefficiency To be sure, unclear and…

Privatization has been one of the pillars of the counter-revolution against development economics and government activism from the 1980s. Many developing countries were forced to accept privatization as a condition for support from the World Bank while many other countries have embraced privatization, often on the pretext of fiscal and debt constraints. Privatization generally refers to changing the status of a business, service or industry from state, government or public ownership to private control. It sometimes also refers to the use of private contractors to provide services previously delivered by the public sector. Privatization can be strictly defined to include…