Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Kremer win the 2019 Nobel Prize
Michael Kremer showed the efficacy of experiments in economics with his research (alongside other colleagues) in Kenya in the 1990s. These experiments were aimed at increasing the effectiveness of schooling. Kremer received his PhD from Harvard University in 1992 and is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT; he formerly taught at Princeton and Harvard. He earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1988. He has authored a number of books in economics, and is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society2. Alongside Esther Duflo, he has conducted research using more experiments – making novel use of randomized controlled trials in economics – in areas such as health, education, and microcredit. Esther Duflo is something of a rarity in her field, being the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (she received her PhD from MIT in 1999), and the second female winner. Eschewing the grand theory model favored by her contemporaries, Duflo has carved out her own academic path, pursuing a rigorous analysis of - in her own words - "the pieces that comprise the whole". Her motivation: a long-held commitment to the alleviation of poverty. She is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology at MIT. "Instead of relying on our intuition, or that of others, we set up large-scale, rigorous randomized controlled trials to understand what works, what does not work, and why. We are not alone: this movement has taken hold in economics" She's not wrong. Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs), whose popularization the Nobel winners have helped to spearhead, have changed the face of development economics in two very different ways. The first is practical: they’ve simply become the new norm. As put by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, RCTs now ‘dominate development economics’, and are riding the wave of methodological supremacy. Originally borrowed from medicine, their premise is easily understood. Researchers assess the effect of a ‘development intervention’ by dividing participants into groups, with only some being subjected to said intervention. The outcomes of each group are then measured against each other, and the efficacy of any intervention is thus determined. Through the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which Duflo and Banerjee co-founded (along with Sendhil Mullainathan) in 2003, over a thousand of these experiments have been conducted across the developing world. These have occurred in studies ranging from levels of immunization in India to primary school standards in Kenya. In RCTs, these researchers saw an apt way of identifying - if present - causal relationships between intervention and outcome, while simultaneously guarding against the chronic problem that blights much development policy - selection bias. Especially in development, but also across economics more broadly, the method has been readily accepted. The commitment to RCTs is rooted in humility - a sentiment that elsewhere in economics often appears conspicuously absent. Duflo has likened her work to plumbing: "we solve problems with a combination of intuition grounded in science, some guesswork aided by experience and a bunch of pure trial and error". Their approach also helps address something economics has long failed to do: it humanises the poor. Again, it’s Duflo's words that capture this best: "we have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness." Awareness of this kind not only imbues their research with nuance and thus precision, it gives it morality too - an appreciation and respect of the human subjects at the center of their work. Sources 1: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2019/10/press-economicsciences2019-2.pdf 2: https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/abhijit-banerjee/short-bio
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019 has been awarded to three economists “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”1: Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer.
Economic Development, Innovation and Growth (JEL O)
Browse our job listings for economics opportunities 1. Journal of Finance Published by Wiley. The official publication of The American Finance Association, which publishes English-language research in all areas of finance. It is one of the most highly cited and broadly read journals in the field. It reaches over 8,000 academics, professionals, libraries and institutions around the world, and is published six times a year. 2. The Review of Financial Studies Published by Oxford Academic. Covering both theoretical and empirical work in finance, the Review publishes high-quality papers which are immediately relevant to the field of finance. It interprets finance as including 'the interface between finance and economics.' It is published once a month. 3. Journal of Financial Economics Published by Elsevier. A top-tier journal which accepts empirical and analytical papers, particularly in the areas of capital markets, financial institutions, corporate finance, corporate governance, and the economics of organizations. It focuses on 'research in the area of... the theory of the firm', and is published monthly. <11an>limit:2;categories:jobs|courses|conferences|Professor;disciplines:Financial Economics (JEL G)</11an> 4. Journal of Accounting and Economics Published by Elsevier. A journal which focuses on the interface between economic theory and the practice of accounting, particularly in how economic analyses can be applied to accounting problems. It covers the role of accounting within firms, the information content and role of accounting numbers in capital markets, the role of accounting in financial contracts and monitoring agency relationships, determining accounting standards, theories of accounting firms, and government regulation of corporate disclosure and the accounting profession. It is published bimonthly. 5. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Published by Cambridge. Covering theoretical and empirical research, particularly regarding the topics of corporate finance, investments, capital and security markets, and quantitative methods of particular relevance to financial researchers. It has a circulation of 3,000 and accepts less than 10% of the manuscripts submitted to it every year. It is published bimonthly. 6. Journal of Banking and Finance Published by Elsevier. A journal for research on financial institutions and the system in which they operate, with a focus on policy-oriented research and theoretical work. Its aim is on theoretical developments and how these can be implemented, as well as research on domestic and international policy with respect to financial institutions and markets. It aims to improve communication between academic communities and policymakers. It is published on a monthly basis. 7. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking Published by Wiley. A professional journal aimed at researchers and policymakers as well as academics, which covers broad areas of money, banking, credit markets, regulation of financial institutions, international payments, portfolio management, and monetary and fiscal policy. It is published seven times each year. 8. Journal of International Money and Finance Published by Elsevier. A journal for those who work in the areas of international monetary economics or international finance, including researchers and financial market professionals. It hopes to provide research that combines both of these areas, and authors are generally focused on exchange rate behaviour, foreign exchange options, international capital markets, international monetary and fiscal policy, international transmission and all related research areas. It is published monthly. 9. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting Published by Wiley. Covers topics in accounting, corporate finance, and corporate governance, with an emphasis on informational problems in financial markets and business organisations and the way in which accounting can help alleviate them. It aims to publish research on accounting, corporate finance, corporate governance and their interfaces. It welcomes theoretical papers, but the theories therein 'should yield novel testable implications'. It is published ten times per year. 10. Journal of International Financial Management and Accounting Published by Wiley. For the publication of research on the international aspects of financial management and reporting, banking and financial services, auditing, and taxation. It focuses on expanding knowledge of the impact of imperfections in the world product, factor and financial markets, as well as the impact of institutional, regulatory and accounting differences across countries. It tries to provide a forum for interaction between academics and practitioners. It is published thrice per year.
It's important to keep your finger on the pulse of the latest updates in your field. Otherwise your knowledge could be out of date and your research won't be be topically informed. The finance journals listed here are some of the best in the English-speaking world, offering the latest insights into finance, economics, accounting and business. If you're studying or working in the field of finance, here's our list of the top finance journals you should be reading.
Economists, so the story goes, had successfully grasped the essence of human behaviour: rational, and, therefore, highly predictable. With this discovery, an age-old question whose answer for millennia had eluded humanity was finally laid to rest. Where philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists had failed, economists had struck gold. They had cracked it. As a result, imperfect theories - as economic theories inherently are - started to be treated as laws of nature, like facts, and confidence among economists erred towards hubris. A sense of exclusivity pervaded the field, an unspoken agreement that outsiders were unwelcome, and their contributions unneeded. Economists preferred to work in isolation, adding to what they saw as a body of incrementally growing objective knowledge. When called upon, politicians typically assimilated their prescriptions - who were they to contest it? - and a docile public simply stood by, watching on in ignorant bliss. How could it be any other way? To the untrained, the language of economists is enough to render any growth-guaranteeing model incomprehensible. Indeed, the extent that their work is misunderstood is shocking - Brits were famously unable to distinguish debt from deficit despite enduring waves of austerity justified, in part, by both. Thus, for much of their legitimacy economists have relied upon blind faith, an investment the masses have, for a long time, been more than happy to make. It’s basically a science after all! <11an>limit:2;categories:workshops;disciplines:Economics</11an> A discipline in crisis In the last 10 years, however, things have changed, and in this era defined by populist, anti-establishment politics, economists’ time in the sun looks to be drawing to a close - for the time being at least. Reliance on their theories is withering, and general trust in their practice has waned. Politicians, clearly, have distanced themselves from economic aides. Gone are the days when leaders swore allegiance to economists. Margaret Thatcher’s fawning over Milton Friedman or Bill Clinton’s exaltation of Joseph Steglitz now feel like distant memories. And it’s difficult to imagine Trump invoking the spirit of Robert Lucas Jr. any time soon. To the contrary, much of his policy has been at odds with mainstream economic wisdom - his trade war with China, for instance, widely condemned. Although Trump’s particular ambivalence towards economists is indicative of his own capricious nature, it's also aligned with a general breakdown of trust that has swept society. 2008 Financial Crisis Much can be traced back to the global financial crisis, which left the profession reeling, dealing its reputation an almighty blow. As professor Franklin Allen recalls of economists of the time, ‘it’s not just that they missed it, they positively denied it would happen’ - the banks, consensus dictated, were simply ‘too big to fail’. Following the crash, economists were expected to take centre stage and steer the global economy towards recovery - that was their job. On that front, though, they also failed. The recovery - itself a generous term given the context - has been sluggish and uneven, the Economic Policy Institute calling it ‘the slowest in recent history’. And meanwhile, poverty levels across much of the Western world have been rising. Orthodoxy had long dictated that job creation solves poverty, the dictum to this day forming the basis of many an economist’s outlook. If jobs can be made, things will be okay. Post-recession developments on both sides of the Atlantic, however, have seen this one-time pillar of economic thought gutted of its credibility. The UK city of Sheffield provides an illustrative example. Deindustrialised in the 80s and 90s and then hit hard by the recession, Sheffield was subject to a typical prescription for economic revival: redevelopment of the city centre and an expansion of its university that together were designed to stimulate job creation. Superficially at least, the initiative worked as intended: as of 2018 unemployment was down 50% compared to the 1990s. Statistics like these, though, serve only to mask how little has changed. Indeed, despite more people working, in many parts of the city the exact same social problems persist. The issue is no longer finding a job; it’s finding a job that pays enough to live on, and they, by all accounts, are in short supply. As a result, in-work poverty across Britain has skyrocketed, working families often unable to put food on the table, forcing food banks to make up the shortfall. Data suggests that this trend, far from exclusive to Sheffield, is replicated across the EU, workers in poverty ‘rising steadily since the financial crisis’, according to one Financial Times article. In America the same development is underway, food stamps reaching record levels while employment statistics soar. GDP may be rising but wages have stagnated. Currently in the US over half the households classified as living in poverty contain now at least one working adult. Back in the UK, real wages have actually fallen against a backdrop of slow but steady growth. Across the continent, ‘the lost decade’ - a phrase originally used to refer to Japan’s period of stagnation in the 1990s - is frequently invoked, in an illustration of the widespread nature of the phenomenon. In truth, the decoupling of growth and wage gain has baffled economists, many finding it difficult to comprehend the disintegration of one of their founding myths. ‘An upturn is coming…’ Offering little in the way of remedy, they instead continue to insist that with unemployment falling, the tightening of the labour market will eventually lead to a corresponding rise in wages. While there is fairly widespread consensus supporting this, the economy of Australia encourages scepticism. Sheltered from the recession and approaching 30 consecutive years of productivity growth, its wage growth at the end of 2018 was barely 2%. The upturn is yet to happen. For those experiencing an extended period of wage stagnation, or even decline, constant promises of a just-round-the-corner increase mean little. They are no distraction from the grim realities of life getting harder. To make matters worse, in the few instances where wage growth has been recorded, it’s generally been unevenly spread. Studies of OECD members have shown that when growth occurs, the wage increases of the top 1% typically far exceed that of the median worker. This is consistently supported by statistics from across the developed world, which uniformly show that inequality, in both wealth and income, is deepening - a trend described by UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi as a ‘significant obstacle to translating economic growth into inclusive prosperity’. Recent research has even suggested that in certain areas IMF prescriptions have actually exacerbated inequality, the same IMF that boasts its staff are among the ‘best and the brightest’, and has solidified its reputation as ‘an organisation that solves problems’. A glimmer of hope? In many ways, the loss of faith in economists is really not surprising. Their record, quite simply, is a bad one. On the big questions, they have, for over a decade now, given few answers. A culture of overconfidence led to the 2008 crash, and since then the profession’s reputation, like many economies around the world, has been in tatters. Sidelined by politicians and mistrusted by the masses, economists' stock is somewhere close to an all-time low. There is, at least, some sign rehabilitation may be underway. Most notably, a growing number of outsiders have been welcomed into the field, in an overdue tempering of its more exclusive tendencies. The inclusion of historians, psychologists, and sociologists, among others, has afforded economics a methodological dexterity it previously lacked, broadening its scope. Greater interdisciplinary dialogue has also overseen a return of humility, as theories and models previously sacrosanct have been better scrutinised, refined, and sometimes debunked. However, in response to many of the biggest challenges (inequality, stagnant wages, etc.) the discipline remains wanting. Its orthodoxies have been undermined, but are yet to be replaced, and it’s crying out for fresh ideas. Perhaps the saddest thing, though, is that this has been the case for some time.
The reputation gained by economists has been a remarkable feat of PR; a branding job like no other. Quite how it developed remains a mystery, some inexplicable sleight-of-hand. Its consequence, however, is far easier to discern: in the minds of many, economics came to be thought of as a science. Removed from its rough prediction roots, it became a discipline of watertight theory, with a methodology capable of unearthing indisputable truths.
Check out our economics job listings Rebranded as microcredit and more recently, financial inclusion, it has come to dominate the social investment sector, acquiring something of a cult following in the process. Described as transformative, and touted a panacea by its loyalists, the craze has persisted despite growing academic evidence questioning its efficacy. In some ways, such loyalty is unsurprising. There is little shortage of inspiring anecdotes of hardworking individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps having put their meagre micro-loan to exceptionally good use. These stories are uplifting and it’s tempting - and all too easy - to conclude that they’re typical of recipients of microfinance. And yet, when the data has been assessed - of which, it should also be said, there is not a huge amount - the results have been inconclusive, at best. Empirically speaking, a resounding endorsement of microfinance is impossible; the research simply isn’t there. ‘On current evidence, the best estimate of the average impact of microcredit on the poverty of clients is zero’ declared development economist David Roodman. The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has expressed similar reservations. Commenting on a systemic literature review into microfinance it concluded that ‘no clear evidence yet exists that microfinance programmes have positive impacts’, also stating that the zealous support it receives is based on ‘foundations of sand’. It’s certainly curious that although formal, government-backed microfinance initiatives are now widely available across much of the developing world, a huge number of loan sharks and predatory lenders still operate in parallel. Surely if microfinance is failing to compete with informal lenders, it’s not functioning as intended? Here the problems it's encountered are explored in an attempt to better grasp why a seemingly so-well-intentioned endeavour has reportedly been so badly misfiring. The issues There are a number of problems that microfinance has run into, problems which Roodman’s sobering book, Due Diligence, has taken great pains to uncover. Some are the result of good intentions gone awry, others the result of mismanagement; most, though, are underpinned by the commercialisation of the industry that took place in the 2000s, when many non-profits involved in microfinance became commercial enterprises. The unleashing of the profit motive saw interest rates rise as boards caved to money-hungry shareholders, while an increase in aggressive marketing and loan collection simultaneously occurred. During the 2000s, in both Zambia and Mexico, interest rates for some microloans were hiked to over 200%. Rather than relieving, they actually exacerbated poverty in the areas where they were taken out. Similar problems were also uncovered in Bangladesh, one of the biggest recipients of microfinance, where women were found borrowing money from relatives, and at times, even forgoing basic necessities in order to repay their loans. Often, this was for fear of the consequences of defaulting. The majority had been lent money through borrowing groups - a means of credit where groups are jointly responsible for one another’s loans - and research revealed that this had created intense peer pressure with regard to repayment, the ‘group’ sometimes taking the law into its own hands when payments went unpaid. The industry has also become a victim of its own monetary success. Massive proliferation of profit-seeking microfinance programs has led to fierce competition in the sector, with some institutions surrendering to a ‘race for clients’ in order to increase their profitability and to attract lenders. As a corollary, background checks made on prospective borrowers’ ability to pay back their loans became less and less stringent. In many cases, this caused spiralling over-indebtedness - microfinance’s long-term foe - as people were unable to pay back the money they’d been lent. Use of the loan This lack of prudential oversight has contributed to another big issue facing microfinance: that many loans are used to fund consumption rather than income-generating initiatives. A study from 2015 showed that in South Africa 94% of microloans were being used simply to fund subsistence. In these instances, those borrowing do not generate any new income, making the repayment of the initial loan difficult, if not impossible, which prompts them to take out further loans, thus accruing further debt. On the occasion that loans are used to bankroll new businesses, the pervasive poverty that often surrounds them can mean a lack of consumer demand, leading to the eventual failure of the venture. A potential solution to this would be to place greater restrictions of those eligible to take out loans. Applicants, for instance, could be obliged to fulfil some kind of financial criteria like providing a credible business plan. This, however, introduces a host of ethical problems, the most prominent being to what degree should rich people be able to determine how poor people spend their money? And relying on the behavioural standards of the rich, as history has repeatedly shown, is rarely a good idea. The ill-judged allocation of credit, as is commonplace across microfinance schemes, also provides entrepreneurship opportunities for ‘middle men’. Borrowers who have greater access to microfinance initiatives have been known to then lend to poorer borrowers at higher interest rates than they themselves received. Consequently, the poorest micro-entrepreneurs benefit less than the comparatively less poor, in a dynamic that reinforces existing socio-economic hierarchies and creates greater room for exploitation. <11an>limit:2;categories:jobs|courses|conferences|Professor;disciplines:Financial Economics (JEL G)|Economic Development, Innovation and Growth (JEL O)</11an> What can be done? Many of these problems arise from a lack of sufficient regulation. Until now the sector has regulated itself, with undue faith placed in the free market’s ‘natural’ efficiency. The main effort to protect clients thus far has come in the form of a global regulatory initiative called The Smart Campaign, described by chief operational officer of Alliance Microfinance, Hugh Sinclair, as offering a ‘watered-down, ineffective set of voluntary principles’. In 2014, it was widely panned when it certified the infamous Banco Compartomas, Latin America’s largest microfinance bank, which had previously made headlines for charging poor Mexicans triple-digit interest rates. This led even Yunus to concede that ‘self-regulation doesn’t really work’, and that many practices really should not continue as they were. Looking forward Perhaps part of its appeal is based on the fact that microfinance does not threaten existing political or economic structures. It is simple and highly seductive: the poor can be saved by the rich, who, by doing so, become richer. What’s not to like? It’s the neoliberal’s dream. Clearly, though, things are not that simple. When the profit motive is involved, exploitation is rarely far behind. Whether it’s extortionate interest rates or general misallocation of funds, the transgressions of this project have been many. For this reason, regulation, currently all too lacklustre, must be rigorously enforced so that the benefits of microfinance are not entirely lost. Countries like Ecuador have recognised the need for a national regulatory framework and offer the beginnings of a roadmap that could be emulated elsewhere. Reasonable interest rate caps, client protection, beefed-up risk management, flexible repayment periods; all must be considered if the true potential of microfinance is ever to be realised. Quite how far that may stretch remains to be seen.
Since its inception in the 1970s, microfinance has become the darling of development organisations the world over - the idea with the potential to save the planet’s poor. Pioneered by Bangladeshi social entrepreneur and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus, it provides the financially marginalized with banking services that, given their impoverishment, would otherwise be out of reach. Such provision, its proponents claim, empowers the poor to take control of their own lives and plot their own path out of poverty - an antidote that is humane, retains the dignity of it recipients, and is lucrative. Aside from bank accounts and insurance, it is mostly implemented in the form of microloans.
Public Economics & Economic Policy (JEL H)
This changed in 2018, in America, when the cause was reinvigorated by political upstart and now darling of the left, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Since sensationally winning New York’s 14th congressional district, Cortez has helped drag green policy, and the GND in particular, to the centre of the race for the Democrat Presidential nomination, gaining it international exposure. Meanwhile, weekly climate marches in many of the world’s major cities, the emergence of Greta Thunberg, and the action of groups like Extinction Rebellion have ensured the climate crisis now tops the news agenda everywhere. Rid of the reputation that had it dismissed as outlandish and unfundable, the GND has surged in popularity, and according to a YouGov Blue poll, its core policies enjoy support from a majority of Americans. Despite this fandom, detractors remain and its future is far from guaranteed. Indeed, upcoming elections in the US and UK, both certain to be polarised, will likely be pivotal in deciding whether this once fledgling and radical idea, seeded in a cramped inner-city living room, ever comes to maturation. Browse our job listings here What does it address? Quite simply: climate change and inequality. The GND is underpinned by two fundamental and interconnected observations. The first is that the current economic system is failing: the pockets of corporate polluters and billionaires are lined, while working class families, communities of colour, and other minorities are exposed to stagnant wages, toxic pollution, and dead-end jobs. The second recognises that the climate crisis magnifies these systemic injustices. Hard-hit communities are typically hit hardest by storms, droughts, flooding etc., as entrenched inequality deprives them of the resources required to adapt, cope and, in some cases, live. It follows that climate change and inequality can only be addressed together. This is the GND’s starting point. Through the mobilisation of vast public resources, the GND plans a transition from an economy built on fossil fuels and exploitation to one driven by clean energy and dignified work. Owing to its scale and widespread appropriation this has been articulated in various ways, with plans citing different costs and diverging deadlines. That said, at its core there remains a set of largely consistent aims which include: transferring 100% of the nation’s power generation to renewables; retrofitting all buildings to ensure they are energy efficient; decarbonising agriculture, transportation and manufacturing; and investing in drawdown technologies that extract carbon and other greenhouse gases from the air. Committed adoption of these goals would, in turn, make green technology, expertise, and services a major U.S. export, increasing GDP and allowing America to assume a leadership role in guiding other countries to carbon-neutral economies. Inequality and empowering workers The nature of the reforms, ubiquitous as they are, mean a diversity of jobs would be created everywhere. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ proposed GND, which borrows heavily from Cortez’, estimates it would generate as many as 20 million ‘good paying, union jobs with strong benefits and safety standards’, many of which would be reserved for low-income families and communities of colour. With unemployment in the US standing at around 6 million, job creation of this magnitude would, in effect, serve as a de facto job guarantee for all those actively seeking work, realising, in the process, a staple-demand of the socialist movement. Such widespread opportunity would also empower the broader working class by defanging the threat of unemployment, the greatest barrier to organising for improved working conditions. The effects of this could be huge, for the fear of perpetual unemployment has long-been the capitalist’s trump card, helping keep the scales tipped, forcibly, in his favour. It’s threat is so potent it routinely cows workers to accept wages too low to provide a decent standard of living, and has all but forbidden them to unionise - they simply have no recourse. The consequences are stark and worsening: 3.1 million Americans in full-time work now live below the poverty-line, and increasing numbers of children are growing up poor. A job guarantee would go some way to arrest this growing exploitation: it would naturally expand trade union rights, and strengthen, more generally, the position of the vulnerable worker. Who is to pay? The chief criticism of its still many detractors is the cost, the claim that it’s financially unfeasible. And it’s true, there’s no doubt it will be expensive. Its proponents, however, suggest that far from bankrupting the country, the ‘suite of economic reforms’, as at times it’s been called, would actually pay for itself - after 15 years if Sanders is to be believed. Although the exact economics of the project are predictably hazy, many remain confident that through a combination of higher taxes, reduced military spending, repealed fossil fuel subsidies, increased revenue from new energy, and income tax generated from millions of new jobs, it can yet be funded. Vagaries aside, it’s clear the cost of inaction will be much, much higher. Every passing day serves as a reminder of why we need change on the scale of the Green New Deal. Every drought, hurricane, or flood, every story of a child going hungry, a parent enduring long-term unemployment, or a worker being exploited, adds to the growing evidence of its necessity. Inequality and climate change threaten not just our dignity but our existence, and continued inaction, which would likely be deadly, makes us all complicit. Yes, a Green New Deal is a huge undertaking and highly ambitious. But does that make it unworkable? Wars have previously mobilised countries on similar scales to that which is now required. Why not again? The mother of two-birds-one-stone solutions may well be in sight; it’s time we grabbed it.
Although recently popularised in America, the Green New Deal (GND) was actually born during the early days of the 2007/8 financial crisis, in a small flat in London. The owner of the flat was analyst and foreseer of the crisis, Ann Pettifor; the occasion was a get-together of environmentalists and economists who had convened to draft a plan they hoped would both ‘transform the economy and protect the ecosystem’. Unfortunately for the London attendees, the prevailing political currents post crash proved especially hostile toward their idea, and prioritised, instead, principles of fiscal discipline and austerity, while largely sidelining issues of climate. And as long as such consensus reigned, the nascent GND was forced to lie dormant, far from political discourse.
Agricultural and Environmental Economics (JEL Q)
The Economic Benefits of Renewable Energy
Compared to the roughly 76,000 jobs in coal in the US, renewable energy is a far greater employer. In the United States alone, the solar and wind industries employ a combined 360,000. As of 2017, less than a thousand people worked in the coal industry in the United Kingdom, and yet around 125,000 work in the renewable energy industries. It’s clear that right now, clean energy is a much more important employer than dirty coal. And these numbers aren’t set to decline; rather, most predictions suggest they will exponentially increase, particularly if countries stick to their given targets for renewable energies. The US Department of Energy wants to achieve 20% wind power by 2030. To get there, around 100,000 more turbines will be needed, which equates to roughly 500,000 more jobs. In 2019, resigning Prime Minister Theresa May set a target of zero emissions by 2030, another goal that will require substantial investment in sustainables. Climate change, as laid out by Senior Editor William Pearse in his piece on the destructive nature of the crisis, has the potential to destroy our economy in ways, and on scales, we are currently unable to fathom. Renewable energies are perhaps the most important answer to the question of how we reverse this trend and save not only our economies, but our entire world as we know it. The creation of jobs is an essential part of how renewables will do this. But that’s not all they’re going to do. Browse our job listings to find your perfect position Renewing the economy Traditionally, the use of fossil fuels has had a weighty financial advantage over renewables. In recent years, though, this has stopped being the case: solar and wind power especially have become financially competitive as suppliers of energy, and their increased usage across the world reflects this. Unfortunately, rather than becoming the replacement for unsustainable energy sources they were once hailed as, they have merely been used to supplement existing supplies as global demand continues to grow. Regardless, as renewables have become more and more competitive, they have become more widely used, and investment in them is exceptionally good for the economy. Aside from the aforementioned employment potential, an IRENA report from 2016 suggested that ‘doubling the share of renewables by 2030 could increase global GDP by 1.1% ($1.3 trillion)’. On top of this, renewable energy can stimulate trade, decrease the costs of fuel imports, inspire capital investment, and increase property tax revenue and lease payments to landlords. The most important of these – the investment opportunities – was roughly $100 billion from 2005-2015. In addition to these numbers are the more indirect, but just as important, effects that a switch to renewable energy, and a subsequent alleviation of the climate crisis, would entail. For example, if air quality was improved, the volume of people across the world who are hospitalised due to breathing conditions would decrease. There are perhaps 12,000 premature deaths due to climate change in the US alone every year, and many more suffer serious health problems which can hospitalise them. The strain on healthcare systems that climate change contributes to is massive; take London, where predictions suggest air pollution causes breathing problems in 4 new adults every day. Fixing these problems would free up funds for treatment and research into cures for the serious endemic health problems that plague society. The above arguments take for granted that GDP is the measure of the economic wellbeing of society, received wisdom that has endured through the ages. And yet some – ecological economists being the prime example – have tried to rebuff this and introduce their own measuring stick: GPI, or Genuine Progress Indicator. GPI includes things like income gaps, poverty levels, and rates of environmental damage to see how well the world economy is really doing. By this yardstick, economic worth per person peaked in 1978, and has been steadily decreasing ever since. Moreover, the ecology itself has a monetary worth. Ecological economists predicted in the late nineties that the environment was worth around $33 trillion, over twice the GDP of the world at the time. Although the figure holds little economic utility, the point of the exercise was to highlight the monetary worth of the environment, while simultaneously revealing GDP’s inadequacy as a measuring stick. Naturally this doesn’t take into account nature’s less tangible aspects, such as its often astounding beauty, or indeed, how essential it is to our survival. Unsustainable wealth inequality Climate change, as one may guess, disproportionately affects the poor. The scientific consensus that climate change intensifies weather conditions is well known, and the effects of this intensification have been seen in recent years. The Californian wildfires and other natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey were at least influenced by the rising temperature, if not directly caused by it. And the economic damage of these ‘acts of God’, as insurance companies so love to name them? In 2017 alone, environmental disasters in the United States cost a total of $306 billion. Naturally, the poor shoulder this burden. As more poorer people are forced to build their homes in at-risk areas and are affected by natural disasters, they are subsequently left high and dry by insurance companies who may not pay out for these types of events. The poor being penalised for a problem that affects them disproportionately is, of course, not only an American phenomenon. In 2019, the ultra low emission zone (Ulez) was extended to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week in central London. While on the face of it this policy is positive, reducing air pollution by taking cars off the road and forcing people to drive cleaner vehicles, it is, inevitably, the working-class who take the brunt of the cost. Those with vehicles over 3.5 tonnes have to now pay a whopping £100 a day on top of the congestion charge. White collar workers whose livelihoods depend on their being able to use their vans and lorries in central London have been put essentially out of work due to these new rules, and those who were told to change their vehicles to supposedly environmentally-friendly options in the past – such as during the diesel tax break of 2001, implemented before diesel became the enemy – have been hit the hardest. Many of those who will have to pay the charge, which could be up to £24 a day between 7am and 6pm, simply don’t have the money to pay for a newer vehicle that fits in with the latest Euro 6 engine standard from 2015. Planned for 2021 is to bring the Ulez into action in all areas inside the North and South Circular, affecting even more of those who cannot afford it. In fairness, in February 2019 a £21 million scrappage scheme to help small businesses upgrade their vehicles was launched; unfortunately, this isn’t enough to help those who are poor but don’t own their own business, like cleaners and care workers, for example. Writing in the Independent, Oliver Barnes argues that Ulez exposes the fact that ‘London remains an unequal and unforgiving place which lets the wealthiest get off scot-free, while pitting its poorest residents against one another.’ It’s hard to argue against this logic. Moving away from the West, the poorest are also hit by climate change in the less-well developed regions of the world. The spread of infectious diseases can be increased by changing environmental conditions as habits are destroyed, causing animals to move closer to human populations, and raising temperatures, which means malaria-spreading mosquitoes have a larger area to inhabit than before. The Zika outbreak of 2014-15, for example, was caused by subtropical mosquitos who thrived above-averagely warm temperatures across South America, arguably caused by climate change. These outbreaks not only mean massive strains on the healthcare systems of developing countries, but also that tourism, on which many of these states depend, is negatively affected. The economic effects of such outbreaks can be devastating for countries which are already struggling financially. Rising temperatures also affect crop growth, causing failures and droughts. For developing countries which depend on agriculture, the loss of a single yield can be catastrophic to the economy, not to mention the tragic loss of life this entails. A changing climate One thing’s for certain: combating climate change will lower the risk of natural disasters and the outbreak of diseases, which means that the poor will suffer less. At the moment, they shoulder most of the burden. To combat this disparity, rather than introducing relatively arbitrary low emission zones, larger, more fundamental changes need to be made on an international level that prevent things like, for example, corporations effecting huge deforestation and militaries devastating ecologies. Alongside these, protections need to be put into place that make sure those who can afford it foot the bill for what are going to be some hard lifestyle and societal changes. This could include something like a green tax on luxury items that are particularly bad for the environment, and the making of green products at affordable prices. Most important, however, will be massive investment in renewable energy. The jobs these industries will create should help ease some of the burden on the poor, particularly those currently in precarious employment; in the meantime, unfair taxes should be discarded. The only way to implement all of this is through a transnational, borderless approach to environmental protection. If the climate crisis is going to be solved, and if renewables are going to be pushed to the forefront of our energy solutions, countries will need to work together in order to conduct research into improving their efficiency and affordability. International legislation needs to be put in place that prevents the expansion of non-sustainable energy sources and encourages (or makes obligatory, even) investment in renewables. The infrastructure that is needed to construct a renewable world will require skill sets from workers across the world, making sustainable immigration an essential piece of this puzzle. Substantial investments need to come from both governments and private funds, and the monetary aspect will be more viable if countries work together to make the climate their utmost priority. Political differences, such as those between China and the United States, will have to be put aside, something easier said than done. Making the world renewable isn’t an easy task; at the same time, it’s by no means impossible. It requires international cooperation – and the making of some tough decisions – to force it to happen. We can only hope that by the time the leaders of this world have got their act together, it isn’t already too late.
In 2018, United States President Donald Trump said his administration was putting more coal miners back into work, having previously rattled on about how important coal jobs were to the future of the US. Perhaps it should be no surprise that his words were empty. The Trump administration has added a negligible 2,000 coal mining jobs since it took control, and whatever bump in coal production 2018 saw was quick to fade away. Obviously, Trump’s pledge to keep the industry alive was a political stunt, not a decision based on the economic realities of the moment; for if it had been, Trump wouldn’t have been talking about coal, but about renewable energy.
The coup was prevented mainly due to a campaign of civil resistance led by newly elected Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had been the first person in history to resign from the Politburo voluntarily a few years earlier in 1987, and this garnered him a reputation as a rebel and an anti-establishment figure. His involvement in stopping the August Putsch, as it became known, solidified his popularity in the Soviet Union. Although Gorbachev was restored to his previous position as General Secretary of the Communist Party, his power was vastly diminished, the event having destabilised the already-fragile political situation in the USSR. Yeltsin was hailed as a hero and remained President after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. After taking power, Yeltsin implemented a series of capitalist, post-Soviet reforms that privatised huge portions of Russia’s state-owned assets. Swept up in the rushing tide of selling were large portions of the industrial, energy, and financial sectors, marking the first time private ownership of property and enterprise had been legal since the Soviet Union’s creation in the early twentieth century. Massive privatisation in Russia caused two related effects. First, inequality rose sharply, coinciding with a GDP collapse and a decline in industrial output. Second, much of the diminishing wealth of Russian enterprises was concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals – oligarchs – who became even richer, with company stocks of state-owned enterprises being transferred to criminal gangs and mob bosses. Predictably, those who suffered most were the regular citizens of Russia. Despite Yeltsin’s reputation as a charismatic rebel able to win over the hearts of the desperate Russian population, he wasn’t able to successfully run a market economy, and by 1999 his popularity had disintegrated to such an extent that he was forced to resign under intense internal pressure. Just how did it all go so wrong? Download the INOMICS Handbook! Economic catastrophe According to David Satter in The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin, the start date for Yeltsin’s reforms can be traced to January 2nd, 1992. On this day, Yegor Gaidar, Deputy Prime Minister, freed prices. His prediction, according to Satter, was that prices would increase between three and five times. But this isn’t what happened. Over the course of the next ten months, prices rose by a factor of nearly thirty. The results of this were that the money in regular people’s savings accounts, money that had in some cases been saved for decades, disappeared virtually overnight. Hyperinflation had the added effect of being a perfect environment for a criminal class to take control of the markets and earn huge amounts of money. Due to a shortage of turnover capital as a result of inflation, production was paralysed. The regime’s answer to this was to issue government credits at rates of 10 to 25%. Instead of being used to pay workers’ salaries, though, they were deposited at banks, and bank officials and factory directors split the profits. Some got themselves export licences through bribing government officials, bought raw materials in roubles and then sold them abroad at world prices, making huge amounts of money in the process. Others acquired import permits after the government, fearing famine, began selling them in 1991. Food products were imported at 1% their real value, the rest of the cost subsidised by Western commodity credits, and a small group of traders made enormous sums of money from it: in 1992, import subsidies amounted to 15% of GDP. A second scheme the government put in place was the distribution of vouchers, which were meant to represent ‘a citizen’s share of the national wealth’, valued at ten thousand roubles. Many Russians were uncertain what to do with these vouchers, and so sold them on the street for minuscule returns like a bottle of vodka or ten dollars. Some invested them in voucher funds, which turned out to be scams, or bought shares in their own factories. But organised crime groups realised they could use these vouchers to invest in industry. These groups, who collected thousands of vouchers over a few years, used them to secure around a third of the country’s industrial base, propelling themselves to unimaginable wealth. These measures, implemented apparently in good faith, led to the collapse of the Russian economy. Russia’s GDP fell by 50% between 1992 and 1998. This was worse than the decline faced by the United States during the Great Depression. In the same period, industrial production declined by 56%. (Some estimates say these figures are askew: lack of industrial investment and the stopping of production of non-consumed goods may have distorted this figure. For example, the military sector, which has less weight in a nominally ‘free’ market, experienced a sharp drop in production. Regardless, the number is high.) Since then, things haven’t got huge amounts better: although Russian GDP peaked in 2013 at $2 trillion, it was back down to $1.2 trillion again in 2016 due to a drop in oil prices and exchange rates. Crony capitalism and criminal gangs Russia remains in the top-third most corrupt countries in the world: as of 2018, 138th from 180. Corruption affects all aspects of Russian administration, and it has been argued that it ‘coincided with the illegal dispersal of the equivalent of billions of dollars from the Soviet state treasury into private accounts across Europe and the U.S.’ By 2011, the average bribe had increase to 236,000 roubles from just 9,000 in 2008, many times the inflation rate over the same three year period. Estimates of how much this corruption, judged by Russia’s famous ‘shadow economy’, cost the country in terms of GDP vary, from 3.5-7% as judged by the Russian government, to 48% as judged by the World Bank. That’s right: nearly half of Russia’s GDP is estimated by the World Bank to be caught up in the shadow economy. This economy, which functions through the bribing of government officials not only to vote the right way but simply to do their jobs in the first place, is made up of unreported salaries and astronomical rates of tax evasion. A recurring theme is that the Russian general population pays the biggest price of this corruption. Untenable rises in tariffs for housing, water, gas and electricity outpace the rate of inflation many times, and the main cause of these increases has been attributed to corruption among high-level officials. Public officials become richer and richer as a result. The money they make from these bribes obviously has to be laundered, and although an anti-money laundering initiative was put into place in 2013, it has been largely unsuccessful in preventing the practice. One of the main reforms under Gorbachev was the legalisation of cooperatives, which became the only privately owned businesses in the Soviet Union. These cooperatives were successful, but led to a different problem: the police would only protect state enterprises. This meant that criminal gangs formed across the country which offered ‘protection’ in exchange for money, perhaps better described as extortion. By the time Yeltsin implemented his reforms, almost everybody was paying off someone for protection. But the gangs quickly realised these smaller markets weren’t the most lucrative way to operate. Instead, they began targeting the newly-wealthy business owners and bankers, many ending up victims of contract killings by gang members who wanted to take over these recently-formed enterprises. This criminality led to problems not only domestically but also with foreign businessmen. Trying to invest in a Russian business often led to dealings with gangsters who demanded money for protection, and any attempt to appeal to the authorities revealed that the gangsters had contacts in the police and the government that went all the way to the top. Who takes the fall? Despite still essentially being in competition with the West in much the same vein as it was during the Cold War (at least according to analyses of Russia’s exceptionalism by esteemed historian Stephen Kotkin) Russia still lags behind on some major indicators of country development. Ranking low on labour rights, social spending and tax policy, Russia placed only fiftieth on an international scale of equality, behind all of its Western neighbours and falling short of other former Soviet States like Georgia. A European Parliament study of Russian equality confirmed these conclusions, finding that ‘nearly half of pre-tax national incomes goes to Russia’s top 10%’, and that among large countries it had the highest proportion of billionaires than any other. Further qualification was needed: ‘Given that these figures do not take account of the huge wealth (estimated at up to 75% of Russia’s GDP) hidden in offshore accounts, they probably understate inequality.’ (Emphasis mine.) Demographic results of the Russian economic disaster were no better. The life expectancy of men dropped by more than six years between 1990 and 1994. In 1998, it sat at fifty-seven, ‘the lowest in the industrial world’, according to Satter. Many in the West refused to believe the death rate in Russia in the 1990s: the population dropped by 750,000 per year across the decade. In 1998, when the Russian state defaulted on $40 billion worth of debt, currency exchanges were updating their conversion rates from roubles to dollars by the hour. Estimates suggest that living standards dropped by 40% during the 1998 crisis. The criminal mindset that pervaded life – criminality was everywhere, and it was no longer a surprise that society could only function through criminal means – meant that violence and death became much more common. Russians were much more likely to kill themselves or be murdered than in almost any other industrialised nation, and the main victims of this were regular people, a huge proportion of whom were already living in poverty. Many, unable to pay for their medical bills or for the bare essentials, simply gave up. Others were tricked into racketeering schemes which covered everything from religion to apartments, and plenty of these involved murdering those who became involved. To sedate the population, the Yeltsin government lifted all restrictions on the sale of alcohol, causing massive strain on a healthcare system that wasn’t receiving investment. Post-Soviet Russia may be improving on some fronts, but quality of life for the median Russian only really started getting better in the 2010s. A bleak future By the time Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999 in a period of relative economic growth, Yeltsin’s popularity ratings were astoundingly low. Putin was seem as something new, someone to counteract the squalor of the preceding decade. While the Russian economy has grown, the political system remains unstable and unfair, and though many are out of the poverty they were thrust into by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, more still feel dejected in a system which rewards criminality and violence. Between 2014 and 2017, the Russian rouble collapsed, leading to another financial crisis. A decline in confidence in the Russian economy as a result of the fall in the price of oil in 2014, as well as sanctions imposed on Russia due to its annexation of Crimea, led to many investors selling off their Russian assets. Although since 2017 the Russian economy has been rebounding somewhat, 35% of all financial assets are owned by the 110 richest Russians. Moscow truly is the billionaire capital of the world: its levels of inequality are almost unbelievable for a country with the sixth-largest economy in the world. One of the main results of the economic disaster of post-Soviet Russia is the government’s authoritarian – some would argue dictatorial – character. Yeltsin’s election during the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, although not totally free and fair, was the closest Russia has come to proper democracy in over a century. The 1996 elections were riddled with electoral problems, such as Yeltsin using government money to fund his campaign, as well as huge amounts of media bias due to the fact that his government owned two of the national television channels and funded most independent newspapers. Media bias has plagued all subsequent elections throughout the 2000s, and although Putin was banned from running for a third term in 2008, a day after Dmitry Medvedev became President Putin was made Prime Minister, power remaining in all but name in his hands. And, after the 2012 election, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said ‘There were serious problems from the very start of this election. The point of elections is that the outcome should be uncertain. This was not the case in Russia. There was no real competition and abuse of government resources ensured that the ultimate winner of the election was never in doubt.’ Much of these problems stem from the economic crisis of the 90s. That being said, if Russia is going to sort itself out, the solution lies with more than just money: it needs to inculcate true democracy. Unfortunately, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon due to the current leadership's insistence on holding on to power. Instead, the people will continue to suffer, and Russia will remain a country of corruption, criminality, and authoritarianism.
In the early hours of the 21st of August 1991, a putsch in the Soviet Union against Mikhail Gorbachev failed, leaving three men dead and the country in a state of shock. The coup had been staged by members of the Soviet government who had taken issue with Gorbachev’s liberalising, democratising reforms, which he had been slowly putting into place over the previous few years. Those who had planned the attack then fled, and were all taken into custody within three days.
Fast forward to 2019, however, and a cocktail of increasingly unethical business practice, rank inequality, and precarious work have put paid to this reputation. Celebration has been replaced by suspicion, and where reverence was once felt there now exists resentment. It’s hardly surprising either: in a country where medical debt is approaching $81 billion, is it really possible to justify a $129.4 million salary like which was recently paid to Discovery Inc. CEO, David Zaslav? Free-market logic? Many rail against such incomes, branding them a symbol of all that’s wrong with the current economic and political systems. A smattering of others simply can’t make sense of them, the figures, somewhat perversely, too large to hold any value. And then there are the fundamentalist free-marketeers who wonder what all the fuss is about. While conceding that yes CEO pay may sound excessive, they defer to the authority of the market, in all its infallible glory, to explain that incomes are, in fact, exactly where it should be, and merely a reflection of CEOs’ worth. If a boss receives 300 times more pay than their average worker, it because their contribution adds 300 times more value to the company. And with that, typically, the conversation is over. Pushed for more detail, and they’ll likely bristle, accusing the questioner of engaging in unsavoury acts of envy and spite, which, by anyone’s standard is not a good look. ‘Work harder’ the more sassy among them sometimes like to part with, ‘maybe one day you can make it too’. But is this explanation really good enough? And are these ‘market-designated’ earnings actually fair? Suggestion that a CEO contributes 300 times more value to a company than a worker does sound, on first hearing at least, rather outlandish; they remain a human being after all. Is any one individual really that valuable? On investigation, and using the same free-market logic defenders of CEO pay rely on, the answer looks like a resounding no. In fact, three key reasons emerge - discussed below - that reveal exec pay to be far from natural and point instead to it being profligate, unjust, and sometimes even corrupt. The great divergence American CEOs today earn approximately 10 times more than their predecessors of the 1960s and 70s, despite overseeing companies that are, in relative terms, far less successful. During this time, the ratio of CEO compensation to the average worker has also majorly distorted. In the 60/70s, it lay somewhere in the region of 30-40 to 1 - already excessive in some people’s eyes. By the 2000s, owing to rapid rise in the 80s, it had reached a whopping 300-400. Worker wages, on the other hand, were estimated by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) to have grown just 13% between 1973-2006. 13% in 33 years: that is less than half a percent per year; essentially, that is stagnancy. Provided with these statistics, a free-market enthusiast’s only available conclusion would be that CEOs became ten times more productive in a period in which workers’ productivity remained almost exactly the same. Give that a second; let that supposition sink in. A common justification for this steep rise is that as companies have got bigger in size, the importance of the CEO has grown commensurably: shrewd decisions made by the CEO of a billion dollar company, the argument goes, could easily increase company earnings by a few million. Also, to ensure the best candidate is secured, top dollar must be paid, lest they be poached by a rival company. With this in mind, surely it makes sense that these factors are reflected in the size of the pay packet? Well, no, not exactly. Although, there may be some small kernel of truth to the growing importance of the CEO, it doesn't account for the magnitude or manner of wage increase that we’ve seen. For one, it overlooks the fact that wages increased most rapidly in the 80s, even though company size had been growing for some time before. And more importantly, it doesn’t explain why, as bosses lined their pockets, workers’ pay flatlined. By the argument’s own logic, workers, too, should have experienced significant wage increase, as, owing to the complex cooperation and divisions of labour customary in large institutions, they also assume greater importance as a company grows. How else can you explain HR departments? America the anomaly Observations made by Cambridge Professor, Ha-joon Chang, further undermine these justifications. He posits: if ‘the increasing importance of top managerial decisions is the main reason for CEO salary inflation why are CEOs in Japan and Europe running similarly large companies paid only a fraction of what American CEOs are paid?’ Are Americans bringing something priceless to the party simply by virtue of being American? The EPI, again, provide reliable statistics on the matter, showing that in the 2000s German CEOs were paid 55% of what their American counterparts received, the Dutch just 40%, and the Japanes an almost unbelievably low 25%. Notably these figures do not include stock options granted to CEOs, which, in the US, are typically much higher. Chang has estimated that when stock options are included, Japanese CEOs’ compensation totals just to 5% of their US counterparts. More recent data compiled by Harvard’s Forum of Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation has shown that US CEO pay has continued to increase into the 2010s, whereas in Europe pay has been far more volatile, and across the region as a whole has fallen each year since 2015. It’s not that American CEOs are running their companies any better, either. To the contrary, Chang highlights that in many cases they are actually being outperformed by their European and Japanese equivalents. He also discounts American CEOs enjoying better wages because wages, generally, are higher in America, for outside of highly skilled employment, it simply isn't true - wages are, in fact, rather similar. Japanese workers make around 90% of Americans, while in comparison with German workers, Americans actually receive less. Insulated from market forces Their legitimacy aside, there is the question of whether we should even care. If a company are silly enough to pay their CEO fiendish amounts, let them. Thriftier outfits with more sensible compensation packages will eventually outperform, and then eliminate them - market forces will see to it. Unfortunately, history has shown this function cannot be relied on, for two main reasons. First, the process of eliminating excessive CEO pay is incredibly slow: one need only remember the decades prior to General Motors’ bankruptcy, during which top managers continued to receive huge salaries and bonuses even as the business was collapsing - nothing done to check the blatant injustice. The second reason, which partially accounts for the first, is the power the managerial class have acquired, both within their own companies, thanks to their pay, and politically, also thanks to their pay. This phenomenon is particularly acute in the US, where the line between business and politics is so blurry it’s practically invisible - the revolving door connecting Washington and Wall Street now an accepted reality. So close are ties, many private CEOs actually end up heading government departments, and lobbying influence, often funded by those very same CEOs, has never been greater. Wielding such enormous power has allowed them, rather easily it should be said, to insulate their pay from both market forces and governmental regulation. The result: the average salary of a US CEO is $15.6 million, The aftermath of the financial crisis was the clearest demonstration of this in action. Despite known criminal behaviour and major malpractice among the managerial ranks, few of those implicated lost their jobs, even less took a pay cut, and there was high-profile resistance (which ultimately was successful) against attempts made by the US congress to cap the pay of managers of financial firms. Rarely, if ever, has there been such a public display of how unfair the system really is - it’s supposed to punish inefficiency and mismanagement. Instead, it rewarded them, and in doing so, confirmed what the above also argues: that exec pay isn't natural or deserved, and its existence alone is not evidence of its legitimacy. Rather, it’s the result of greed, a lack of regulation, and foul play. It must be changed.
Rising year on year, seemingly irrespective of company performance, US executive pay is eye-watering. For decades now, its increase - the small blip following the financial crisis aside - has been rapid. As their wallets have bulged, however, CEOs’ standing in the public eye, has fallen precipitously - plotted on a graph the relationship between the two would make a big X. And this is a significant shift. It wasn't long ago that the American entrepreneur was heralded as an almost mythical figure: the embodiment of all that was good about the country; the opportunity it afforded; the work ethic it rewarded; the fact that with the right attitude anything was possible. They were the American Dream in action; evidence that it could be made real.
Does Economics Have a Problem with Women?
In any field, such inequity would be troubling, but because of the role economics plays in our society—how much it informs public policy—the problem it poses is especially disturbing. While in power, mostly male politicians refer to mostly male economists to legitimise their policy programmes; male priorities derived from male experience are, in effect, trumping their female counterparts. This collaboration serves to imbue patriarchy into the legislation that structures our daily lives, hindering the achievement of gender equality. Browse our job listings for economics opportunities To some, this may sound over the top, far-fetched even—but it isn’t. In fact, it’s borne out in the data. A recent a survey of members of the American Economic Association (AEA) revealed the extent to which male and female economists diverge in some fundamental areas. Perhaps most alarming is the split on the gender pay gap: only 14% of women said the gap was explained by differing educational qualifications and occupational choices, compared to 54% of men. Given men are advantaged by the gap it is awfully convenient for them to believe ‘superior’ education and ‘wiser’ decision-making accounts for it. In practice, such a discrepancy means the voices that need to be heard to fight the injustice are less audible, sometimes even ignored, and consequently the pay gap endures. For men, the issue remains a concern, but evidently nowhere near a priority—and unfortunately, they set the agenda. Worryingly, divergence in opinion extends to other major policy areas too. Women, for example, are more likely to support greater wealth distribution, larger government size, and a higher minimum wage—initiatives generally considered to be especially beneficial for women. And therein lies the inhibiting pattern that pervades the discipline. Simply put, academics research areas in which they are already familiar and/or have personal connection/stand to gain from. The underrepresentation of women, therefore, inherently limits the variety of questions economists look at (a short-coming that applies, even more strikingly, to people of colour) and allows white male opinion to remain the governing opinion. This lack of diversity is unquestionably constraining the field’s intellectual development and stymieing its ability to bring about transformative change. How bad is the situation? The gender imbalance in economics begins with education and is then traceable at every stage of the economist’s career development—a phenomenon former chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellin calls the ‘the leaky pipeline’. While ascending the career ladder, women are met with ever-thicker glass ceilings, halting progress and in some cases, encouraging the abandonment of the profession altogether—the more senior the economist, the less likely it is a woman. Economist and New York Times contributor, Justin Wolfers, has looked into the number of women majoring in economics at undergraduate level, and found that the proportion, having ‘peaked in the mid-to-late 1990s’, now stands at a paltry 35%, the same amount as in the early 1980s. This, too, is against a broader backdrop of women excelling across academia, comfortably earning the majority of completed undergraduate degrees. Adhering to the pipeline logic, these numbers further dwindle at doctorate stage. In another study by the AEA, it was shown that at many of the top US universities less than one fifth of incoming economics doctoral students were women, with the share then completing their PhDs also falling. Enter the world of work and things get no better. A sobering illustration of the vocational restrictions women face can again be seen looking at universities. As noted by economist Heather Sarsons, ‘female economists are twice as likely to be denied tenure as the male colleagues’, and of the women who make it, only 29% then proceed to make full professorship after seven years. For men, this figure is almost double, standing at 56%. Donna Ginther, professor at the University of Kansas, has found that these occupational realities greatly inhibit female job satisfaction, their happiness in the workplace lagging far behind that experienced by men. Why is economics such a bad egg? The obvious next question is why? Why is economics failing to improve gender diversity when other male-dominated fields are making progress? Lack of female ability can be immediately dismissed, and not just for its flagrant misogyny. There is much evidence that actually points to women matching, and in numerous cases, outperforming men while still in the ‘pipeline’. In both the UK and US, for instance, women average better grades at undergraduate level, and while working are equally as prolific with regard to publication output. Instead, analysis—like for example that conducted by Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Rouse—suggests that a bias, both implicit and institutional, is the ‘more likely culprit’. Analysis in this area is growing, and has already uncovered a host of systematic barriers that women face. The list is dauntingly long. As reported by The Economist's Data Team in 2018, investigation has shown that female economists are being held to a higher standard than their male counterparts, particularly when it comes to publishing. The demands made of their research are more rigorous: women experience an increased likelihood of requested rewrites, while the criticism levelled at their work is also much harsher. Together, these factors conspire to make publication a more time-consuming and onerous task. To add insult to injury, when work is co-authored with a man, research shows the female contributor receives significantly less peer credit than the male. Sarsons exposed the ubiquitous nature of this bias in a lengthy study based on publication data from the last 40 years. While acknowledging the ‘publish or perish’ culture that pervades academia and that much economic research is collaborative, Sarsons shows that the consequences of this bias severely damage women’s chances of tenure. The gendered division of labour within economics helps to compound the above problems. As explained by Emmanuelle Auriol, once qualified, the focus of male and female economists tends to diverge along certain lines, women gravitating towards more people-oriented sub-fields like ‘labour, health and education’, while men are drawn to macroeconomics. She continues, asserting that editors and publishers—who predictably are mostly men—are often less accustomed to the sub-fields that women are more likely to represent, this relative ignorance reducing the chances of their publication. This lack of visibility, in turn, denies the sub-fields a certain level of respectability, tarnishing their academic prestige and potential utility. Going forward The marketplace of ideas has long been presumed an effective sieve, siphoning the good ideas from the bad, ensuring that quality research rises, like cream, to the top, making itself available for public use. By this logic the current state of publication would suggest that men are simply having better ideas. Instead, the problem is that the sieve is not working the way it should, and perhaps never has. It functions, rather, as a self-reinforcing, self-serving device that has only been effective in insulating the discipline from change, risking it becoming anachronistic. For it to consider itself a true meritocracy the culture of economics needs upheaval—a process that should begin with its own investigative nous being turned in-house. Candid discussion of implicit biases must take place; high female dropout rates need thorough investigation; and clear descriptions of female contribution to co-authored pieces have to be guaranteed. Of course, these are mere starting points, the first repairs to an incredibly porous pipeline. Most important of all is that the work towards this renovation starts now.
Economics has a gender problem, it always has, and unfortunately, it appears to be getting worse. Until recently, the impression was that this historically male-dominated discipline was turning a corner—albeit rather slowly—and the number of women studying economics was creeping upwards. That progress, however, looks to have stalled, and by some accounts, including that of the Australian Department of Education, actually gone into reverse. All the while, the number of women in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths)—long notorious for their poor gender ratios—has been steadily increasing. It looks as though the ‘old boys’ club’ of economics might be closing ranks.
Browse our job listings for more opportunities Compared to previous generations they live longer with their parents; earn less money, while working longer hours; are more stressed; and reportedly, have less sex. To compound this, they know it needn’t be this way, that their reality – sex put to one side – is a political choice that theoretically could be changed. With this in mind, it’s little surprise that the annual Deloitte Global Millenial Survey paints a picture of a demographic consumed by disillusionment and mistrust – bestowing Millennials the moniker the ‘disrupted generation’. Comprised of the views of over 13,000 Millennials from 42 countries and territories, the aim of the survey is to gauge the general Millennial mood, glean their opinions on the present, and judge their expectations of the future. The following is a brief summary of some of the larger takeaways. A lack of trust Faced with continuous technological and societal dislocation, Millennials are experiencing what was described as a growing sense of ‘uneasiness and pessimism’: the feeling that something isn’t right, that the cards they were dealt weren’t fairly distributed. Much of this found articulation in their general disregard and mistrust of traditional institutions, particularly politicians and religious leaders, neither of whom – in the view of the majority – are making a positive impact on the world. In addition to being thought of as inept, they’re also viewed as dishonest, almost half of the respondents having zero faith in either set of leaders as ‘sources of reliable information’. Trust, in fact, seems to be a diminishing commodity, falling elsewhere too. Over a quarter of respondents reported having no trust in conventional media as a source of accurate information. Indeed, it barely outranked social media platforms as a dependable means of accessing news, raising the question: who exactly do Millennials trust to disseminate facts? The internet offers something of an answer, having borne witness to a huge proliferation of alternative media. And yet, it still leaves much unclear. What can be said is that the declining faith in traditional pillars of trust, and the absence, as of yet, of an institution or group filling this void, is further fuelling the generational sense of uncertainty. Facts are an orienting force, foundations through which the world can be framed. Their lack, therefore, perceived or otherwise, is a thoroughly disconcerting influence. Falling trust, falling optimism Businesses have not escaped Millennial ire either, and are held in marginally higher esteem than their political and religious counterparts. Just 55% believed businesses were making a positive impact, after four consecutive years in which the figure hovered in the 70s. These results were driven by the growing sense that businesses operate in their own interest with little regard for society at large. Given the steady stream of scandal – the recklessness, for instance, that prompted the recession – environmental devastation – in which big business is routinely implicated – and everyday worker exploitation, it’s hardly surprising. Businesses, generally, were thought out of step with Millennials’ priorities, neglecting both their societal and environmental responsibilities. This misalignment has made them the focus of much scorn. Declining trust has, perhaps predictably, developed in parallel with a decline in optimism. While there is an acceptance that the economic situation in which they live is not a good one, Millennials have little expectation that things will improve in the foreseeable future – only 26% were expecting improvement in their countries in the next 12 months. From a personal perspective, over half were convinced that their own financial situation would either remain the same or worsen in the same time period. With ample time to have fixed, or at least better repaired, the damage wrought by the recession, what Deloitte has called pervasive 'pessimism,' could easily be called pragmatism. Industry 4.0 The forces of Industry 4.0 – visible now in the majority of workplaces – are expected to ramp up the disruption of the already disrupted careers of Millennials. Since their entry into it, the job market has been in constant fluctuation, and change, which has become its defining characteristic, is set only to increase. For some jobs, this has meant the assimilation of new tech, while for others it has meant full automation. With a convergent scientific community predicting that this trend will transform economies over and over, it was surprising that a quarter of Millennials thought the forces of industry 4.0 would have no bearing on their jobs at all. Equally strange was that just 49% thought new technologies would only ‘augment’ their jobs. These responses reflected an uncharacteristic optimism, or possible naiveté, that could have great consequences if they translate into political choice. Governments must ready their populations for automation and there is little indication that incumbents are up to the task. When choosing their successors, Millennials will have the decisive vote. The disrupted disrupt While Millennials have been the subject of much disruption, some disturbances have also been of their own making. Their behaviour, both passively – in delaying large purchases and having fewer children – and actively – their preparedness, for instance, to quit their current jobs – has, and is, profoundly affecting society and business. For example, Millennials expressed loyalty to companies that ‘deliver best on financial performance, community impact, talent development, and diversity and inclusion’. When these criteria are left unfulfilled, they indicated they would likely end their relationship with said company. Further disrupting business is their willingness to engage in freelance and contractual work, which many explained as paying better and affording greater flexibility. The ethical stance taken with regard to work is mirrored in how Millennials consume, the younger generations speaking with their wallets, rewarding companies they believe most respect their values. Again, making a positive impact on society was high on their list of priorities. This is forcing a profit-driven and, at times, callous business community to reassess the way it works, a response that has been slow but is underway. It also poses a serious challenge to companies that desire a stable workforce, as most do, for if left unimpressed Millennials will walk. Going forward Entering the job market as the recession unfolded, beginning careers in a post-crash world; it’s hardly surprising that optimism among the young is in short supply. Millennial lives have played out against a backdrop of perpetual social, political and economic commotion, with periods of stability practically non-existent. And yet, although disillusioned and often distrustful, they have remained both ambitious and altruistic, the survey showing most are still are confident that their life goals will be achieved. They may be down, but the ‘snowflakes’, as they are sometimes derisorily called, are far from out. To the contrary, they are intent on making a decent fist of it, despite living in a present defined by change and facing a possible future of even greater uncertainty.
Sandwiched snugly between generations X and Z, Millennials, it's fair to say, have had it tough. Entering the workforce around the time of the Great Recession and now enduring the disorienting forces of the so-called fourth industrial revolution (also known as Industry 4.0), their world has been one of constant flux. History is accelerating faster than ever and technological progress in some areas is exponential, rapidly changing the face of work. And yet, with the possibility of abundance now a reality, Millennials are experiencing their economic opportunities reduce, many privileges enjoyed by their baby-booming forbears – improving living standards, home ownership etc. – increasingly out of reach.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq three years later was supposed to mark the decline of its influence, a decline that was widely believed would be terminal. After a decade of war, people were weary and with inequality spiralling, problems at home were considered of greater concern than escapades abroad. It felt like a spent force. The political arena reflected this too: the term ‘neocon’ was reduced to an epithet, a word of derision for Democrats, and occasionally even moderated Republicans, to hurl when in heated debate and seeking to score cheap points. Over time it lost much of its meaning - no longer a reliable indicator of political outlook, simply a way to denounce or discredit. And then came the election of Donald Trump, and like with much else, things changed. Despite his campaign blasting neocon’s signature policy, the invasion of Iraq, as a ‘big fat mistake’, Trump’s presidency has offered neocons a way back. In his three tumultuous years in office, his administration has welcomed back into the fold architect of the Iraq invasion and chief hawk, John Bolton, now National Security Advisor; and appointed war-enthusiast, Mike Pompeo, as Secretary of State. The political persuasion of both is well known, and in the case of Bolton, his penchant for war may well be his defining characteristic. A similar trend can be seen in the media. Newspapers and magazines have increasingly been featuring opinion of a neocon bent. From the New York Times to the Atlantic, the development is a marked one. With bellicosity of this kind on the up, consuming not just op-eds but presidential addresses, the feeling is eerily familiar - the neocons are asserting themselves, flexing their muscles once more. <11an>limit:2;categories:jobs|conferences;disciplines:Public Economics & Economic Policy (JEL H)|Economic Systems (JEL P)</11an> A short history of neoconservatism Given its overuse, a detour back to its origins and early development helps get a better handle on the ideology and its more dangerous proclivities. Neoconservatism was a child of the 1960s, born in response to the New Left and the growing pacifism that emerged in and alongside the anti-war movement. The hallmark of its early adherents - many who identified as liberals – and the source of their zeal, was an uncompromising opposition to the totalitarian Soviet Union. Fearful that the West was ‘losing its purpose’, its fingers slipping on the mantle of global moral arbiter, neocons advocated a strident foreign policy, in which America took centre stage. They scorned Nixon and Carter’s respective attempts at détente with the Soviet Union - conciliatory politics in the face of tyranny was anathema - and celebrated Reagan’s more confrontational approach to Cold War diplomacy. When the Iron Curtain did finally fall, it was a moment both of vindication and trepidation. Buoyed by democracy’s triumph over dictatorship, they were also - with the removal of the Soviet threat - denied their rallying point, their common cause. Rhetorically speaking, with no enemy they were left toothless. It was in this environment of doctrinal uncertainty that a group of its younger acolytes, including one Paul Wolfowitz, came together to explicitly reinstate the ideology’s key principles and to reinvigorate the movement. The paper was innocuously titled the ‘Defense Planning Guidance’; it soon became known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. The paper expressed a desire to construct a world based on American ideals that would be driven by American-directed economic growth. This would, in turn, encourage the emergence of American-style democracies, where previously there had been despotism. The world was to be administered by alliances and inter-governmental organisations led, naturally, by the U.S, and protected by means of assertive diplomacy, economic sanctions, and when necessary, the American military. In certain cases, pre-emptive military action was believed to be justified. In short, the paper’s primary concern was to prevent the emergence of a rival global power. No region was to be dominated unless under the direct supervision of the US; only then could American safety be assured. Although not to a tee, these core principles informed most US foreign policy, irrespective of government, throughout the 90s and into the 00s. Neocons in crisis The project culminated in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The ousting of Saddam Hussein - premised, as we know now, on twisted intelligence - was to serve as a Petri dish for reform of the entire Middle East and the attempt to spread democracy in the region. It was, in effect, a test of the base assumptions of neoconservatism. The policy was a disaster. Over a decade later, Iraq remains in chaos, ravaged by cycles of war, and the Middle East is more fractured and less stable since intervention. Through the failure, the ambitions of the neocons were brutally checked. Their idealism, based in large part on their arrogance, had clashed violently and catastrophically with reality. They were forced to confront the fact that America was not the omnipotent force they presumed, that the imposition of elections alone cannot transform a country, and that to think either was to be unacceptably naïve or unforgivably reckless. Re-birth? And this was supposed to be the end of it, humiliation the final death knell. Neoconservatism was, for most, no longer intellectually credible, its agenda bankrupt. The corridors of power were as far away as they had ever been. And a return looked improbable, if not impossible. That was until Trump. Under his presidency, erratic as it’s been, the impulses of neoconservatism are once again audible, and getting louder. In a contradictory series of events, their re-emergence actually began with Trump castigating the neocon project, deriding the Iraq War and talking down the possibility of future overseas intervention. His campaign promised a focus on Americans, plans framed largely economically: how money was to be saved, where costs could be cut etc. The expense of conflict made it unappealing and to be avoided. Three years in office, however, and things now look very different. The revolving door of his administration has let in hawks John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who, in the absence of a confirmed Secretary of Defence, are de facto Trump’s most influential foreign policy advisers. And their effect is being felt. On assuming their respective roles, both set about asserting their long-held contempt for Iran, quickly bending U.S foreign policy to such feeling. Bolton has repeatedly insisted on the necessity of military action to deal with the ‘rogue’ government, an obsession that has consumed him for the better part of three decades, while Pompeo has declared that ‘there is no doubt… a connection between al-Qaeda an Iran’, and that the country’s continued ‘bloodletting and lawlessness’ needs to be stopped. With the relentless admonishments ringing in Trump’s ears, the increasingly agreeable president was easily persuaded to abandon the Iran nuclear pact. The deal had no bearing on Tehran’s desire to develop nuclear weapons, his two advisors reasoned, and therefore served little purpose. For Trump, the opportunity to dismantle any part of Obama’s legacy has rarely required much justification. Soon after, the duo pushed through the decision to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group, against the advice of many military officials who warned it might encourage retaliation. In true neocon speak, Pompeo explained it as part of an attempt to ‘help the people of Iran get back their freedom’. Again, Trump quickly acquiesced. The openness and conviction with which this hawkish hostility is held appears to be infectious, the free-flying browbeating emboldening other lower profile Republicans to also speak out. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, for instance, recently joined the fray, boasting that the U.S. could defeat Iran in ‘two strikes, the first strike and the last strike’. Ominously, these developments are taking place in a growing ecology of neoconservative thinking by no means exclusive to Trump’s inner circle. Prominent journalists Ari Fleischer, Max Boot, and Robert Kagan are all regularly talking up the advantages of a pre-emptive strike on Iran to their large and loyal audiences, while broadly liberal publications have been reserving countless column inches for those hankering after conflict. Bret Stephens, writing for the New York Times, declared only this month that if Iran doesn’t change its behaviour, ‘we should sink its navy’. Talk of this kind is dangerous; that invasion is viewed so simply, staggering. As analyst Aaron David Miller has said, in case of invasion Iran ‘has many options available to it’. It is a powerful nation with proxies situated throughout the region. Utilising them, as it would if conflict arose, it easily commands enough military strength to badly hurt America: Hezbollah could strike Israel, Shia militias in Iraq could attack American forces, and Iranian backed groups could go after Americans in both Syria and Yemen. The conflict would be messy and destabilise a region already so fractured and volatile. Despite this, according to reports, the Pentagon is planning to increase American presence in the region by 5000-10,000 troops, this after an aircraft carrier, bomber planes and anti-missile batteries have already been sent. Trump has also committed to significantly enlarging military spending, what would be the largest increase in the country’s history, and at the end of June 2019 reportedly blocked a US strike on Iran 10 minutes before it was planned. The signs are not good. War with Iran looks closer than it has done for many years. Neocons have infiltrated the Whitehouse, and are bending the ear of its attention-seeking inhabitant, acclimatising him to their sabre-rattling rhetoric. Meanwhile, an increasingly compliant media is egging them on. The necons may not be huge in numbers but, evidently, they occupy positions of serious influence. For the sake of peace, it's time we all took notice.
In its short and controversial history, neoconservatism has changed America. For almost 60 years, the ideology has variously been embraced and rejected; celebrated for its patriotism and commitment to democracy; and disdained for it hawkish arrogance and imperialistic tendencies. It has simultaneously proven uniquely divisive, while also unifying people across party lines. Quite simply, recent American political history cannot be made sense of without an understanding of neoconservatism; such has been its influence.
Powering the West’s rise from provincial backwater to global force, they permitted Europeans, for the first time in hundreds of years, to experience better living standards than their forebears. More recently, coal-based growth also became an obsession of developing countries, notably China and India, where, in the latter half of the 20th-century industrialisation advanced at breakneck speed, lifting billions out of extreme poverty. Herein lies the great irony. As a result of climate change, these previously poverty-alleviating forces now look set to plunge those billions, those who have just extracted themselves from subsistence living, back to the brink. And such is the speed of the change and our reluctance to address, and in some cases even accept it; the return could be made in less than a generation. Although in areas better prepared, the West, too, stands to suffer greatly, the consequences of climate deterioration destined to afflict indiscriminately, ignorant of national borders. The last year provided a taste of things to come, as North America was subjected to droughts, hurricanes, and forest fires, of sizes and severity previously unknown, leaving parts of the continent ravaged. And there will be no let-up; the regularity of such events is set to increase. The only question is: how far will humanity let things slide? Browse our PhD listings for more opportunities GDP set to plummet In terms of GDP, the devastation that awaits is on a scale that exceeds what is currently economically conceivable. As David Foster Wells has so eloquently explained, the spectrum of growth with which we have any experience, and thus can realistically fathom, ‘stretches from contractions of about 15%, effects we study still in histories of the Depression, to growth about half as fast – about 7%’. Quite simply, today’s terminology and categories are not really capable of reflecting developments outside of these parameters. Unfortunately, outside of these parameters is exactly where we are heading. In one projection – based on the work of respected researchers Solomon Hsiang, Marshall Burke, and Edward Marshall – in which the terms of the Paris Agreement are fulfilled and warming is limited to 2.5-3C, global per capita output is reduced by 15-25% by 2100. For context, this is comparable to, and actually slightly higher than, what was experienced in the 1930s. The difference, however, is that this time around there’s no guarantee a recovery will even be possible. What in today’s economic terms is called a ‘trough’ could become the new economic baseline, the new norm. In fact, on our current course, we’ll be lucky to even get there: the global emissions trajectory, as it stands, has us comfortably missing the commitments made in Paris. Indeed, with climate-threatening leaders Trump and Bolsonaro presiding over two of the world’s largest polluters, the Paris agreement could soon be considered the high point of climate change consensus – no longer a realistic target, simply a nostalgic reminder of collaborative times gone by. The Great Dying The required transformation of energy infrastructure alone would require the mobilisation of people and resources never before seen in peacetime. Warming of 3C, 4C, 5C, or even worse, therefore, remain distinct possibilities and require contemplation – to warn us away from such paths if nothing else. According to the report cited above, 4 degrees, which lies ‘on the low end of the range of warming implied by our current trajectory’, is predicted to cut global output by more the 30%, far more than the Great Recession of 2008, which saw a reduction of 2%, and double that of the Great Depression. Foster-Wells has called this fate the ‘Great Dying’ – if reached things would continue to worsen inexorably. To grasp the enormity of what awaits, and to inform sensible future conduct, it’s helpful to perceive of our climate as a superstructure within which we operate: we are governed by its rules and forced to adapt to its conditions. When these conditions are degraded the consequential impact infiltrates every aspect of life, as every aspect exists within the structure. From the regulation of bacteria in our bodies and the air we breathe, to our ability to travel the planet unencumbered and access water, literally everything is at stake. The same holds true for our economies, both local and global. The warming of the globe, and with it, the natural disasters, flooding, and health crises it entails, will incur costs economies will struggle to absorb, many we are already beginning to see. Countries with a large share of GDP in the agriculture sector, as most developing countries do, will especially suffer, because of all industries agriculture has a particularly low resilience against rising temperature. A report published in Nature Communications in 2017 has predicted that as a result of droughts and water shortages, the U.S will see its annual crop yield decrease 40% by the end of the century. In a pattern typical of climate change, things are projected to be far worse closer to the equator. On our present path, and without huge technological advancement, India, sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, and much of Southeast Asia face the devastation of their agriculture. The UN has predicted that, in turn, this widespread crop depletion will help create 1 billion climate refugees by 2050, placing further pressure on less-damaged agriculture elsewhere. Then there is flooding. None but the most modern infrastructure is built to withstand the type of relentless flooding that’s coming, and that in parts of the world we’ve already seen glimpses of. America and India are particularly vulnerable, having aggressively and rather carelessly developed their coastlines. In just a matter of years, luxury sea-facing apartment blocks and hotels in places like Miami Beach will soon become underwater relics, while densely populated metropolises like Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkatta, home to tens of millions, will ‘face catastrophe’, as invading waters cause untold damage. By 2045 the real estate impact on New Jersey alone is predicted to exceed $25 billion. Across the world, flooding in March 2019 – just a single month – created $9 billion in economic losses, highlighting what analyst Michal Lörinc called ‘the continued vulnerabilities which exist in both developed and emerging markets’. Hurricanes, too, are being created with greater regularity and greater force, rising temperatures increasing their rainfall and wind speeds. Hurricane Florence, which hit the Carolinas in 2018, raged for almost 3 weeks and was estimated to have caused up to $50 billion worth of damage. Without intervention, the regularity of such events will grow, and there will come a time that our inaction will designate when there is simply not enough wealth, locally or globally, to cope. Rebuilding will become a constant state. Declining productivity Just as healthy productivity rates will be needed to mitigate the coming chaos, they are stagnating, and, unfortunately, predicted to fall further – this, too, a result of warming temperatures. Research, like that from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has exposed the negative cognitive effects of direct heat, showing, with alarming precision, how unproductive humans are expected to become as the world warms. ‘When global warming reaches 1.5, 2, 3 and 4°C respectively, the average Work Productivity Loss (WPL) will be 9 (19), 12 (31), 22 (61) and 33 (94) days for developed (developing) countries. Countries in Southeast Asia in a 1.5°C-warming world would suffer the same loss as the developed countries would in a 4°C-warming world.’ With every rise in temperature, GDP suffers, and like compound interest, the effects increase over time. Evidently, the costs of acting on climate change are enormous. What’s also clear, though, is that the costs of not acting are far greater. Market logic can no longer be relied on; it shouldn’t be expected to benevolently act on our behalf. Instead, concerted, coordinated and cooperative intervention is needed. An uncertain future Given the global political landscape, this feels far-fetched. From those with the power to address climate breakdown, we’re accustomed to bluster and virtue signalling, that is, if its reality is even accepted. The main concern is always the next election, never the next generation. And so carbon continues to be emitted into the atmosphere at record rates. Even with imagery of climate degradation saturating global media, little seems to change. The West, in particular, has been guilty of a ‘thank god its not on my doorstep’ mentality. And yet, it is; it’s on everyone’s. Even to those apparently blind, this will soon become incontrovertible. As it is, economies across the world stand braced, many already under the strain of climate change. As costs continue to wrack up, as they will without action, some will buckle under the pressure; this we can be assured of. What follows is anyone’s guess. What we do know, though, and what history instructs us, is that finding out is a risky game indeed.
The history of economic growth, the kind to which we are now accustomed, is inseparably intertwined with the discovery, and then plunder, of fossil fuels. Some historians have even argued their unearthing was its main catalyst, relegating more popular theories of free trade and technological innovation. The argument is seductively simple, and although something of an exaggeration, usefully highlights the strong connection between the two – for in tandem, they radically altered the course of human civilisation.
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In 2017, the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change found that 153 billion working hours had been lost worldwide due to high temperatures, predominantly on farms, and that high temperatures were simultaneously affecting the ability of crops to grow. And Professor Paul Elkins of University College London argued in response to these findings that tackling climate change ‘is going to be a net benefit to humanity in monetary terms.’ Download the INOMICS Handbook! But economics hasn’t cottoned on. Most dominant economic theories work on the assumption that technology and progress can overcome any biological/ biophysical limitations the earth may have. This, of course, isn’t true; we are beginning to see some of the limitations of our unsustainable existence, the above being just a few examples. In 1966 economist Kenneth Boulding called this economic conception of the world the ‘cowboy’, that being a metaphor of the noble wanderer who roams the ‘illimitable plains’ of endless discoverable resources with no thought that they might, at some point, come to an end. Boulding said all the way back then that the problems our planet is facing are ‘not all in the future by any means’. Indeed, they are currently more visible than ever. But this apathy or disinterest with dealing with the problem of climate change isn’t limited to economics. A 2018 Gallup poll revealed that only 64% of Americans think climate change is caused by human activities, and of those only 45% believe it will be a serious threat in their lifetimes. In the Pacific countries and east Asia, only 37% believe climate change will harm them personally, and just 26% of people in the Middle East believe climate change is a problem that is harming people right now. Multiple techniques have been used to change attitudes, including showing the connections between climate change and air pollution and health problems, or to things like the aforementioned forest fires in the USA. Multiple techniques have been used to change attitudes, including showing the connections between climate change and air pollution and health problems, or to things like the aforementioned forest fires in the USA. A common tactic is to show people how important it is to take a personal responsibility for the problem. Unfortunately, this often causes a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance, which is a feeling of discomfort when a person’s beliefs are challenged by new evidence given to them. In the case of climate change, this actually causes people to turn away from the issue due to feelings of guilt, rather than work to combat it. Instead of giving people personal responsibility, a better method is to get people to believe climate change is a communal issue that requires action from the whole community, society, and world. However, a small but growing field of economics wants people to think about the environment in a different sense altogether. If questioned, would you be able to estimate the monetary value of the earth’s ecology? If this figure existed, would it make people stop and think a little harder about exactly what it is we’re destroying? Would it make people care more about the environment if they knew mistreating it would negatively impact the economy? These are questions ecological economics aims to answer. Cowboys and cosmonauts Ecological economics is, in part, a reaction to the traditional cowboy conception of the world. Boulding’s idea was to instead think of the world as a ‘spaceman economy, in which the earth has become a solitary spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything’, and in which human beings must find their natural, sustainable state. In this metaphor, all we have is what is on our spaceship with us – and when that runs out, the money runs out, too. As Robert Costanza, a leading ecological economist, put it in his 1989 article ‘What is Ecological Economics?’, the discipline aims to ‘make economics more cognizant of ecological impacts’ and simultaneously ‘make ecology more sensitive to economic forces, incentives, and constraints’. Costanza reiterated what Boulding had said over twenty years before: ‘current economic paradigms… are all based on the underlying assumption of continuing and unlimited economic growth.’ To combat what Costanza saw as the ‘ignorance’ humans have of the world’s environmental and economic interdependence, he explored technology’s capacity to circumventthe limits of the environment. His conclusion? Technology can’t endlessly circumvent the environment. The limits exist, and economics needs to realise this, soon. Ecological economics argues that using only GDP as a metric (as many economic fields currently do) is unreliable because it doesn’t take into account the costs of things like pollution and deforestation; in its place, it argues for GPI, Genuine Progress Indicator. GPI uses the same data as GDP, but adds things like income gaps, poverty rates and environmental damage. By this judgment economic worth peaked per person in 1978 and we have actually become poorer due to our destruction of the environment. In this sense, the discipline bears similarities to the green and environmental movements that began gaining ground in the 1970s. Ecological economists recognise – and they argue that ‘standard’ economists often don’t realise this, or at least choose to ignore it – that growth cannot be endless. In an interview from 2010, Costanza noted that ‘in nature, things don’t grow forever’. Instead, organisms reach their natural adult size, and then they stop. But this doesn’t mean they stop improving. Organisms continue to develop even after they stop getting physically bigger – like an adult human that isn’t getting any taller, but continues to read books and go to the gym to get smarter and fitter. Constanza admits that the thought of the economy no longer growing is a terrifying one for regular economists, but argues that the economy stalling isn’t a bad thing. Rather, what is needed now is progression to a ‘steady state’, in which our society still improves, but our economy doesn’t get bigger. The revolution will be green In a nutshell, ecological economics attempts to show how human economies and natural ecologies are intrinsically linked and have evolved together through time. The field bridges the gap between economics and several other disciplines, including archaeology, history and anthropology. It wants to change the common understanding that human technology can overcome any boundaries the world throws at us by showing that this judgment is unsustainable and, essentially, wrong. But ecological economics is more than a call to action for economists to change the way they think about the world: it also tries to talk about the natural world in a way people can understand. In 1997, a paper came out that estimated the value of ‘ecosystem services’ – that is,the monetary value of the ecological systems that contribute to human civilisation – at $33 trillion per year. The GNP of the entire world at the time was around $18 trillion. Talking to people in terms of monetary figures helps them comprehend the worth of the environment and the scale of the problem. Money talks. Ecological economists have grasped that. What’s the solution to the forthcoming environmental disaster, then? Sustainable development and green policies, according to ecological economists. The International Society for Ecological Economics, for example, states its purpose as ‘developing a sustainable world.’ Its solutions to the current problems include research into environmental tax reform, how equity relates to sustainability, and how ecological and economic models can be integrated to protect biodiversity and the earth’s atmosphere. To this end, it publishes the latest cutting-edge research on topics such as clean development, transnational conservation projects, and the effects of deforestation in its journal. And it’s not the only one: there’s also the International Journal of Ecological Economics and Statistics, founded in India, which aims to link the discipline to a closer study of ecological statistics. But this isn’t just research for the sake of research – the field wants to change people’s attitude towards ecology, and genuinely influence policy. The International Society and these two journals have developed against the backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating environmental situation and a political sphere that doesn’t seem to care about the crisis we’re facing; yet at the same time, the green and environmental movements have never had more public support. With natural disasters abounding, Western countries dropping out of climate agreements, and nonsensical debates over the actual existence of climate change still being held, the field has an essential role in showing that the economy is fundamentally linked to the natural world we are rapidly destroying. As it becomes increasingly clear that environmental catastrophe is just round the corner, it’s time for economists – and politicians, and everyone else – to finally start paying attention.
In 2018, the World Meteorological Organization published its statement on the State of the Climate. The report showed that the 20 warmest years on record have occurred in the last 22 years. In the same year, the State of California’s Energy Commission published a report linking changing atmospheric conditions due to global warming as a direct cause of the devastating forest fires that swept through California, burning nearly 1.9 million acres’ of land and costing more than US$3.5 billion of damages.
Check out our economics job listings Couching reporting in such hyperbolic terms is nothing new, characterising, as it does, the bulk of mainstream print and broadcast media. Click bait culture has ensured it’s a profitable ploy that makes sound business sense. Its utility in helping society navigate the effects of automation - the tumultuous nature of which is already being felt - is harder to reason. Instead, the incessant deployment of the utopia/dystopia dichotomy seems to have helped foster inertia - a worldwide paralysis of inaction. Big changes are afoot and as The Economist has said 'no one is ready’. The majority of political discussion on the topic offers little in the way of reassurance. Much of the right appears to have taken its traditional recourse in moments of concern: invoking the ‘magic of the market’. An untrammelled market will balance things out they promise, trickle-down economics this, deregulate that. Such rhetoric provides little comfort, particularly to those who have already lost their jobs. The left, on the other hand, has been strangely quiet on the issue, some factions believing fears of automation are being mobilised as a distraction from more pressing issues like the dismantling of the welfare state. In all likelihood, it will require a large and collective political effort to avoid the most dislocating effects of automation. And the beginnings of such a project are currently nowhere to be seen. What's in store? What exactly should they be preparing for? Some say we’ve been here before, and should, therefore, look to the past for guidance. Societies have endured the industrial and digital revolutions, both of which prompted concern over the disruptive effects they would have on the job market. And yet, as they transpired, neither caused the social crisis of extreme mass unemployment many predicted. Instead, jobless rates have continued to rise and fall with the business cycle. The signs, however, point to this wave of automation being different to previous: both faster and more encompassing. Whereas in the past the jobs automated tended to be either manual jobs - prior to the industrial revolution working in agriculture and then later standing on an assembly line - or very narrow computational work calculating numbers, technology is now beginning to displace jobs requiring intellectual or cognitive capability. Learning machines are already making decisions and solving problems quicker and with fewer mistakes than humans, meaning typical white-collar work like quantitative analysis and report creation, particularly when repetitive, are becoming the domain of the machines. Office work, as it’s currently known, is on the verge of being consigned to history. Ultimately, the proportion of work susceptible to automation is getting larger and larger, and no sector is safeguarded from infiltration. Job loss, job change The common retort at this point is that new jobs will be created. And this, of course, is true; new jobs will arise, some presumably that we currently are unable to even fathom. What we don’t know is how many, and of what kind. Because this wave of automation is expected to permeate every corner of the economy, there is a concern the number of jobs created will not offset the number lost. Quite how large the discrepancy will be is unclear. What is certain is that the job market will become increasingly unforgiving. Historian Yuval Noah Harari is recommending that workers of tomorrow should expect at least a handful of occupation changes in their lifetime, such is the changing face of the economy. This is a big deal. For the majority, enforced career change is a radical upheaval, often involving a troubling mix of emotional stress and financial instability. A decade ago, to experience it once was to be considered unlucky. For the coming generation, to experience it twice will likely be thought remarkably fortuitous. Smoothing this transition, if at all possible, will require a transformation of educational systems. In their current form most do little to prepare people, skills-wise or emotionally, for a future defined by change. Soon, too, the ability to actually switch careers may come to be considered a privilege, as when a job is automated and a new one created, there is no guarantee that the newly unemployed person will have the skills required of the new job. What happens then? To quote Harari, 'if you think about a 40-year-old unemployed textile worker in Bangladesh, he or she just doesn't have the skills to design virtual worlds.' And still, the A.I revolution is just a blip on the political radar. Much of the American political class, for instance, seem more wary of Mexicans taking jobs than computers – and thus, with priorities misaligned, the requisite preparation is not being made. Governmental provision of lifelong education, accessible to all and available at any time, could be one intervention that helps stave off the creation of a class of people unneeded by the economy, and potentially deemed surplus to requirements. Indeed, if that scenario did come to pass, a large portion of humanity’s fate would rest in the hands of the powerful. And relying on their benevolence is a risky game. It's all a bit pointless While some jobs created may be inaccessible to many, a large portion may also simply be undesirable. It has been argued that the productivity benefits of automation we are experiencing, instead of leading to a shorter working week, as predicted by John Maynard Keynes in 1930, have instead created an array of pointless jobs, the existence of which cannot even be justified by those who do them. These roles often exist to: bolster the egos of employers, for instance, assistants; to work aggressively on their behalf, such as lobbyists and corporate lawyers; and to ameliorate preventable problems, like programmers that repair botched code. Anthropologist David Graeber has written extensively on this, citing studies that reveal the alarming extent to which people are unsatisfied with their work. In a culture that strongly associates work with self-worth, this is profoundly damaging. And as automation ramps up, his fear, shared by many, is that this trend will continue and the psychological suffering will be widespread. With growing regularity, universal basic income (UBI) is being touted as a potential remedy to both unemployment and the proliferation of ‘pointless’ jobs. Historian Rutger Bergman, for instance, has come to prominence riding the back the UBI wave. Its experimental provision has been recorded as ameliorating the damaging psychological effects of joblessness, while providing its recipients with the freedom to choose jobs (if they exist) they value, rather than being rushed into one they don’t. Again, though, in most quarters UBI is still considered a radical idea, and would require a strong political will for its implementation. For now, at least, this remains some way off. Inequality and unaccountable power The trend towards extreme inequality, as exists across the Western world, also stands to hypercharge the potential problems caused by automation. If left unaddressed, the problem will not be the robots themselves, but rather those who own them. Labour-saving technology is often expensive - precluding its purchase by just anybody - and affords its owner great power. From a financial perspective, once invested in, automated elements can significantly reduce costs and increase the efficiency of a company such that rival enterprises are simply run out of business - ask a record shop owner what they think of Amazon. Through this development, the means of production, already owned, relatively speaking, by a tiny minority, will concentrate into fewer and fewer hands. In a world of diminishing resources, this could prove particularly dangerous. To instead ensure the spoils are at least somewhat shared, it will be incumbent on politicians to regulate, both nationally and internationally, against this, probably through the enforced democratisation of businesses and the breaking up of the biggest companies. Given the influence big business already exerts over the democratic process, through campaign funding, lobbying, etc., this will likely be fraught with difficulty. Without intervention, global power could continue to tip away from governments towards businesses, specifically tech companies, a transition that could make the might of today’s behemoths, Google and Facebook, look insignificant; think Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel The Circle. Action is needed Of course, the issues outlined above represent just a few automation has, or probably will, throw our way. There are, no doubt, many more in store, some that may come in recognisable form, and others that will likely arrive abruptly, without warning, and challenge the conceptual foundations on which we live. What is imperative, therefore (and yet remains conspicuously absent) is that we consider, on a political level particularly, these potential changes and prepare for them as best we can. The lessons are there: the industrial revolution wreaked untold damage on the neediest, and protective reforms only arrived after many lives had been ruined. We must use this as a guide to ensure society pre-empts a repeat of such unnecessary hardship. If ignored, automation, combined with the threat of climate deterioration and the inevitable competition for space and resources, has the unprecedented power to take us to any number of unimaginably dark places. It need not, or rather, it should not be that way - a brighter future can be built and is still within our grasp. It just requires action.
Automation will transform our world; there is no doubt about it. Quite how, though, is highly contested – whether optimist or pessimist, there are predictions to match every predilection. Newspapers alternately run articles speculating a work-free, post-capitalist future filled with armchair philosophising, with forecasts of a world ravaged by inequality in which robots tend to the mega-rich, and everyone else is cast onto the scrap heap to contemplate what-on-earth went wrong. Little, it appears, exists in the in-between.
2019 European Elections Threaten to Bring the EU to Standstill
For these reasons, the upcoming elections hold great significance, and in terms of the EU going forward, could yet be defining. The centre ground across much of Europe has been vacated, no longer thought equipped to deal with the problems the continent faces, and populism from both the left and right has rushed to fill the political void. These changes will be reflected in the results of the elections, quite in what form, though, remains to be seen. What could such changes spell for EU politics? And should we be worried? Here we take a look at the paths down which the union may potentially turn, and consider the immediate future of the biggest trading bloc the world has ever seen. The complexion of Parliament The vote - scheduled for 23-26 May – will dictate which 751 MEPs sit in the European Parliament (EP). In its current constellation, the European People’s Party (EPP) representing the centre-right, and Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), representing the centre-left, form a majority, together making up 54% of the assembly’s seats. This has been hugely beneficial in terms of creating law. Owing to the cooperation of the groupings, the mechanics of EU politics, notoriously both slow and disjointed, have been lubricated, and through negotiation and compromise the last 5 years has seen a steady flow of legislation passed. However, if national politics and polls are anything to go by, this looks sets to change, and radically. The EPP, for instance, looks set to be punished at the polls. Since 2012, centre-right parties have lost popularity across the continent - a trend encapsulated by the Sarkozy induced capitulation of Les Republican in France. More recently, the bloc has also suffered from disunity, unable to agree on how best to deal with a Hungarian government intent on dismantling democratic checks and balances. The wedge issue continues to disrupt the group's cohesion, and the Hungarians remain controversially suspended. Across the floor, the S&D isn’t expected to fare much better. Since the financial crash, its member parties have seen their domestic support slide. In fact, social democracy across Europe looks moribund. German, Dutch, and Italian centre-left parties, in particular, have all had their share of the vote decimated, and there is little sign of the tide changing. Only in Portugal, and perhaps to a lesser degree Spain, is there anything resembling social-democratic revival. It looks, then, as though big change is dawning. Next month we could potentially be looking at an unrecognisable European Parliament, fragmented and divided between integrationists and nationalists, Europhiles and Eurosceptics, and right and left wingers. But could this mean for actual legislation? The effects on legislation Well, such an impasse, as some observers are predicting, would almost certainly make the already difficult process of passing legalisation even trickier. While this might detract from the parliament’s legislative efficiency, a more 'open-to-all' decision-making process may have a positive effect on public interest in democracy at the EU level. However, if populist parties gain enough power to block crucial decisions, as its perfectly plausible they may, all the other parties will have to pull together to keep the EU functioning - and there is no guarantee that will be feasible. In such a scenario, movement on issues like migration and Eurozone reform - likely to be centre-stage during campaigning - would almost certainly stall. For Emmanuel Macron this development, this potential legislative logjam, would be especially frustrating. The French President had made integrationist reform a priority of his; a commitment that has taken on additional personal significance because of the problems he is experiencing at home. Throughout his presidency he has been especially vocal about the need for reform of the Eurozone, suggesting that Europe should harmonise its tax policies and establish a minimum wage in each country. Italy’s far-right Lega party - projected to increase its number of seats by around 20 - is expected to lead a serious challenge to these proposals, and have already shown their disdain for EU prescriptions when they agreed, with their Five Star Movement partners, to a sharp increase in domestic public spending. This flew in the face of repeated admonishments from the EU that Italy must rein in its public spending amid fears it could trigger a debt crisis. Other mooted proposals for further EU integration include the creation of an EU Finance Minister, a joint Eurozone budget, and the establishment of a body tasked with overseeing bloc-wide economic policy. With a larger Eurosceptic faction in parliament these, too, are likely to be kicked into the long grass. Hungarian Premier and populist stalwart Viktor Orban has disparagingly likened such calls to an attempt to build a ‘liberal empire’, and instead has talked up a Europe based ‘strong nation states’ and ‘Christian culture’. To achieve this he believes that migration must be better controlled. This leads us to the area where, besides merely stifling policy, right-wing parties may have the power to seriously influence policy agenda. Although diverging on multiple issues, there is a consensus among them for stronger collective border controls and the militarization of borders. Also discussed has been a possible expansion of policing operations across North Africa, aimed at blocking African migration routes to Europe - the nationalist right has long favoured military solutions to social problems. Post May elections Evidently, an influx of EU-phobic, right-wing MEPs would make the tone of parliamentary debate harsher and legislation harder to pass. At the same time, it could also set the stage for mainstream MEPs to speak out more stridently in defence of European values and the European project more generally; an activity the Brexit remain campaign conspicuously neglected. Routinely, we fail to recognise all that the EU has brought us in its short history – workers rights, environmental protections, lasting peace - too often these are taken for granted. It really wasn't so long ago that none were guaranteed. If we truly are about to enter a battle for the continent’s future, progressives among us better prepare a positive, aspirational vision. And given the false sense of security that seems to have descended, a gentle reminder of the EU’s past achievements could make for a useful start.
With the European elections just two weeks away the EU’s future is looking far from certain - the union is beset by crises and the resolve of its member states is being tested like never before. Much has changed since Europeans last took to the polls: Ukraine had its borders forcibly redrawn when an increasingly hawkish Russia invaded and annexed Crimea; global drought, poverty and violence drove record numbers of refugees to the shores of the Mediterranean; and China has continued its march as a formidable economic and political force. There has also been the small matter of Brexit and the emergence of a populist movement that has made electoral gains across the continent. The current moment, evidently, is one of flux, and the full implications of the transforming political landscape are still to be fully understood.
Trump's failed attempt to bring back coal jobs
Check out our economics job listings Election promises There was obvious political expediency behind such a statement. As a message, bringing back coal jobs remained potent in the rust belt, particularly in states like West Virginia, ravaged by years of industrial decline. And as the election proved, it was sufficiently persuasive; Trump’s carrying of states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa – for many years blue – forged his unlikely route to the White House, despite losing the popular vote. As an election ploy, however, promises of coal riches, much like the rock itself, are one-use-only. If after great effort – as has been made – employment and money don’t return, the promise loses its credibility. And as the 2018 midterms showed, this reality has dawned and the grumbles of discontent are increasingly audible. From an economic perspective, the pinning of such significance on coal was always questionable, to say nothing of how catastrophic it is environmentally. As of 2018, coal made up just a sliver of the American economy, employing around 75,000 people. Or, put another way, fewer people than currently work at bowling alleys or nail salons. Renewables offer the answer Even if enlarged far beyond its current state – a project that would be prohibitively expensive – the industry is an incredibly inefficient means of job creation, for a number of reasons. Typically, the process by which energy is extracted from fossil fuels is mechanised and capital-intensive and does not require much human involvement. This is in stark contrast to the renewable energy industry, which is far more labour intensive. Solar panels, for example, require humans to install them, and wind farms need technicians for regular maintenance. If you want jobs, renewables are where they are. Statistically, this fact is already reflected in the number of Americans employed in renewable energy: around 260,000 work in solar power alone, over three times that of coal. The wind power industry also employs more than coal, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimating around 100,000 nationwide. And these numbers are growing: wind power technician is now the fastest growing job in the whole country – a fact unlikely to escape Trump’s lips any time soon. Positive Projections In a recent study assessing the sectors' potential for job creation, the NREL concluded that renewable energy technologies ‘create more jobs per dollar invested than conventional electricity generation technologies’. And, because they use ‘indigenous’ resources, most of the ‘energy dollars can be kept at home’. The study left little doubt: if the rust belt is to be redeveloped and employment levels boosted, investment into green energy is the way to go. It is less costly, less polluting, and the jobs it produces are more plentiful. Looking forward, the U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that ‘to achieve 20% wind power by 2030 the United States will require more than 100,000 additional wind turbines, creating more than 500,000 new jobs.’ The Wind Vision Report has made similar predictions, suggesting that wind has the potential to support more than 600,000 jobs in manufacturing, installation, maintenance and supporting services by 2050. The job creation would also be geographically well distributed. Turbines can be installed in rural areas at existing farms, often places that have suffered declining incomes and living standards, and where financial injection is most needed. A widespread program of wind farm installation across a state like Illinois, for instance, could provide significant boosts to otherwise flailing local economies. As one expert put it: ‘from a community perspective, the effects could be transformative.' The stimulation of manufacture Commitment to renewables also has the knock-on effect of stimulating manufacturing, an area which has declined across the country and another of Trump’s foremost gripes. This is already happening and wind, again, provides a good example. Turbines are complex bits of machinery, and their construction involves long supply chains. In response to growing demand, their parts are increasingly being sourced from within the US: between 2004-11, the number of manufacturing facilities increased tenfold. With additional commitment and investment in the sector this could be developed even further, and its benefits maximised. As of 2018, around 50% of ‘turbine value’ was produced in the U.S, twelve times that of just a few years prior. Many manufacturers are now planning to increase this to 100% – an expansion that should be encouraged at the federal level. Such impetus would certainly be a preferable alternative to the current situation, where jobs in coal have not been forthcoming. According to Andrew Cosgrove, a Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst, Trump’s ‘impact on the coal sector [thus far] has been extremely minimal in nature despite his rhetoric.' After two years in office, and much deregulation, ‘the needle has barely budged on U.S coal mining employment’. His announcement that ‘the coal industry is back’, delivered perversely to a room made up of many out-of-work coal miners in West Virginia, is simply not reflected in the data. How long will he persist? Ever since his election, Trump has been resolutely swimming against the tide. The coal industry dying for good reason, and there is little that can be done about it. The sector is an inefficient creator of jobs, and because of the increased costliness of transportation and general production, getting less and less competitive in the marketplace. And that is ignoring the environmental costs, which are so severe they are difficult to fully quantify. If Trump were sincere in his promise of putting Americans back to work, renewables would figure high on his agenda. That is where the future lies; it is folly to think otherwise. The fossil fuel lobby, however, has infiltrated deep into his government and gained a controlling stake. A former coal lobbyist actually heads up the Environmental Protection Agency in what appears to be a staggering conflict of interest. Sound energy policy now looks like it will have to wait for Trump to depart office. Until then, it remains to be seen how long his obsession with coal will last, despite the mounting evidence exposing its stupidity. How much money will need to be wasted? How many reports need to be published that point to better, greener alternatives to throwing money down a mine? Alas, like most predictions with this capricious, callous, and careless President, all bets are off.
Along with a border wall and vague promises of greatness, one of Trump’s key campaign pledges was to bring back jobs to the American people. He situated himself, in contrast to Clinton, as the protector of the everyman, a mystical demographic that were at the mercy of the Chinese, their jobs being poached from right under their noses. His plan – as far as he ever articulated it – was predictably grandiose, and in part based on the resuscitation of the dying coal industry. The mines, he promised, would be brought back, en masse, bringing with them jobs and prosperity. His envisioned ‘greatness’ was to arrive accompanied by thick, black, environment-threatening, smog.
What's the difference between a conference, a seminar, a workshop and a symposium?
This article was originally published on Conference Monkey and has been syndicated to our sister websites. If you're looking for a conference to head to this year, check out our conference listings on Conference Monkey. Moreover, the difference between a conference and a seminar may be that a conference has a more general theme with a focus on presentations and lectures, whereas a workshop is usually more specific and hands-on, so to speak. However, as we'll see there are grey areas between these types of events, and the line isn't always clear. Really, what's important is that everyone has a good time and learns something. Nonetheless, it's good to know exactly what you're getting into, especially if you're actually presenting a paper or giving a lecture. So let's dive into the specific differences between a conference, a seminar, a workshop, and a symposium. What's a conference? Conferences tend to be the largest events vs. smaller workshops and seminars. They can number anywhere between fifty attendees to thousands of attendees, and the largest may host even more visitors that that. You'll come across both national and international conferences – national conferences are typically attended primarily by people living within the country which is hosting the event, while international conferences can attract visitors from all over the world. Conferences tend to be the most prestigious forms of events as well, so they are the place where you most want the opportunity to present your work as a talk or as a poster. Speaking of which, conferences will usually involve a number of talks by prominent speakers in addition to poster sessions where researchers present their ideas and data in a visual format. When you attend a poster session, you can walk around and look at each of the different posters and stop to chat or to ask questions of the presenter as well. Presenters will stand next to their poster and will often have a short 5-10 minute explanation of the poster which they will give to anyone who asks. If the conference is a large one, you will find concurrent events. This means that there might be two, four, or even more talks happening at the same time in different locations. You need to be organised to find out when and where the talks you want to see are being held, and you should make good use of your conference timetable which will hold all of this information. If you're planning on attending a conference this year, check out our insight into 10 hacks for a better conference experience. What's a seminar? The difference between a seminar and a workshop is that a seminar tends to be held within one institution or university, and will often a seminar will be a small group of people – say, between five and ten attendees – who come together to focus on a particular issue. Often seminars will be less formally structured than conferences, so one person might give a presentation but it will probably be brief. There is more of a focus on discussion at these events, so do feel free to chime in with your thoughts on the topic at hand. Another difference between a seminar and a conference is that while conferences usually last for between a few days and a week, seminars will be much shorter. They may be for an hour or two in the afternoon rather than lasting all day. Some departments will organise regular seminars, so for example you might meet on the first Monday of every month. Seminars are a great place to test out some new ideas or theories that you've been thinking about but aren't 100% confident with yet. If you're working on a concept or an idea for an experiment but you want to hear some feedback on it before you develop it further, offer to present it at a seminar. This kind of small group is perfect for getting honest feedback and you might even get some suggestions for improvements to your ideas. Check out our insight into tips for a more interesting and memorable conference presentation if you're planning on presenting at any of these types of events this year. What's a workshop? The difference between a workshop and a conference is that workshops are generally smaller than conferences, and are usually only a day or two long and are dedicated to discussing a specific topic. Although these events are held as part of a department, you will often find outside visitors who attend them too. The atmosphere is somewhere between a seminar and a conference, meaning it is less structured than a conference but more formal than a seminar. Workshops are also sometimes more diverse in terms of attendees than other events. You'll find people from different departments and fields attending workshops together, and you may find non-academics such as journalists or people in business will attend too. The best workshops have a specific, action-oriented purpose, and aim to generate some concrete answers to current problems in the field. Workshops are a good opportunity to learn new skills and to familiarise yourself with a topic you don't know well. If this piece has inspired you to apply to a conference, workshop, symposium or seminar, read our piece on how to get accepted to an academic conference. What's a symposium? The main difference between a symposium and a conference is that a symposium tends to be similar to a conference, but smaller. The definition of a symposium isn't completely clear – the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary describes it simply as 'a small conference'. However, similarly to a workshop, a symposium tends to focus on a particular issue rather than a more general theme. Generally a number of experts will come together in order to present their ideas and papers to one another. Similar to a conference in that the focus is on presentations and lectures, and less hands-on than a workshop, a symposium is typically completed in a single day. Symposiums may be more prestigious than a conference, with an emphasis on experts presenting their work and occasionally discussing it afterwards (though not to the extent of a seminar). Finally, symposiums will generally be smaller than a conference. Saying all this, it's likely you'll visit a symposium that seems more like conference and a workshop that could easily be called a seminar. The difference isn't always clear, and there's usually some grey area. What's important is that you learn something while you are there, and get to listen to some of the leading experts in their fields discuss their work.
There are lots of different types of academic event that you might want to attend, such as conferences, seminars, workshops and symposiums. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks, and generally they have a different slant. Size, for instance, is usually a big factor in whether something is regarded as a conference or a symposium. Usually the difference between a conference and a symposium is that a conference will be a larger event and a symposium a smaller one.
Universal Basic Income: a panacea for society's ills?
Browse our job listings for more opportunities Its popularity has risen in correlation with the increasing economic inequality that is now endemic across Europe, and whose spread, political tinkering has done little to inhibit. For their failure to address this widening gulf, centrist parties of the left and right have been punished at the polls, and politics has polarised. Electorates and experts, alike, have begun casting their eyes further afield for something more radical, something more transformative to address the crises in which societies are mired. Many have alighted on UBI as one such solution. But what exactly is Universal Basic Income? And what do its proponents say about it? UBI is cash payment delivered, periodically, to all individuals, without means testing, and regardless of employment status. The income is considered a right, and there are no restrictions placed on what it can be used for. There also exist variants on UBI, differentiated by those who are entitled to receive payment, called, simply, a Basic Income (BI) - context, generally, dictating the restriction. The following is a contemplation on the potential of such policies. Offsets technology-induced and stressful state of unemployment As technology advances with ever-growing rapidity more and more jobs are being lost to robots and algorithms. People entering the workforce now, unlike previous generations, are told to expect multiple career changes in their lives, and to brace themselves for periods of unemployment or low income whilst in between professions. For some, this reality is already being felt, and it's not a pleasant one. There is much research that shows enforced profession change, as will soon be completely mundane, can be psychologically very damaging. An issue compounded by the financial scarcity that is often its by-product. UBI would ease this stressful transition, allowing the jobless to get back to their feet while retaining their dignity, find suitable new work or training, and eventually restart contributing to the economy. The removal of absolute scarcity during this interim period has been shown to facilitate better decision-making by the individual - reducing rashness and encouraging a closer consideration of the longer term. The power to rejuvenate Sceptics of the proposition often question how society could justify giving free money to drug addicts, alcoholics, and ex-criminals, as they would be guaranteed under UBI. On this count, the evidence actually points to UBI having largely positive effects. A trial in Liberia revealed that many addicts and criminals who received UBI, rather than squandering their money as many presumed they would, spent their monthly endowments on subsistence and what the study described as ‘legitimate enterprise’. Similarly, in Give People Money, Journalist Annie Lowrey, identifies a UBI pilot in a small village in Kenya as producing the same results. Before the pilot, the village was made up of dirt roads, had little access to electricity and ran a largely open sewage system. Midway through – the program is ongoing – and the village has been transformed, almost unrecognisable, and is now a prime example of what Lowrey calls innovative entrepreneurship. Both of the above examples speak to an interesting psychological quirk that is often revealed in the discussion of UBI. Namely, when asked about its viability individuals tend to think that although they themselves would put their grant to good use, the initiative would fall down because of the profligacy of others, who are likely to make ill-advised, wasteful choices. In actual fact, when put into practice, UBI has consistently shown that people, irrespective of background, tend to be impressively shrewd when putting their money to use. Reduction in ever-growing bureaucracy In most states, there exist countless governmental organisations responsible for helping those in poverty, handing out unemployment benefits, food stamps, etc. The running of such sprawling, intertwining welfare programs is expensive, time-consuming, and often complicated for both administrators and recipients. A simple cash payment directly to the individual would cut down on this bureaucracy. To give some sense of scale, in the US there are 79 different means-tested programs. To the pleasure of all those concerned with reducing government and red tape, all these could all be scrapped with the introduction of a UBI. Tackling domestic abuse Less publically discussed, but of equally vital importance is its power to tackle abuse. To society’s embarrassment, domestic violence remains prevalent wherever you go. Those who suffer abuse - the majority of which are women - often remain trapped in violent situations, lacking the financial means needed to escape. By ensuring a certain level of financial independence, as UBI would provide, the process of leaving an abusive partner would be simplified. It is unclear how many people currently suffering in silence this could help. Empowering workers Those on the left see UBI as an opportunity to empower the working class, providing them with what historian Rutger Bergman has called ‘real freedom’. For him, this freedom is predicated on the ability to say no, a privilege currently enjoyed exclusively by the rich. UBI, he believes, would give individuals the ability to say no to jobs they didn’t want, to cities they no longer wanted to live in, and to employers who treated them unfairly – that ‘is what real freedom looks like’. Additionally, the redistribution of wealth would provide workers with greater bargaining power. As Annie Lowrey has questioned, ‘why take a crummy job for 7.25 an hour when you have a guaranteed 1,000 dollars a month to fall back on?’ In such a situation, employers would be inclined to take seriously the demands of their workforce, and improving working conditions would likely follow. The future of UBI In many people’s minds what is still lacking is a satisfactorily long, randomised trial of UBI, run with a sufficiently large pool of people. Currently, empirical proof of its long-term success or lack thereof simply does not exist. Even the much-hyped trial recently concluded in Finland, lasted just two years, focused only on the unemployed, and has already been criticised for lacking the scale or ambition to really put UBI, or Basic Income, to the test. Nonetheless, with its promises of transferring not just money, but dignify, responsibility and power back to the people UBI remains a seductive prospect, and one certainly worthy of continued experimentation. Trials are being planned for places as far-flung as India, Iran, and Scotland, and it’s with great anticipation we wait to see how they fare. UBI may yet have its time in the sun.
As a policy, support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) flouts traditional political and social lines, making unlikely bedfellows of those on both the right and left wing. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, free-market evangelist Milton Friedman, and firebrand economist Yanis Varoufakis all count among its high profile, and rather disparate, champions. With the help of their advocacy the initiative has entered into mainstream consciousness, and widespread political discussion of its implementation, in contrast to a few years ago, is now readily had. Gone are the days in which UBI was simply dismissed as an unattainable utopian concept.
Economists are almost unanimous in their assessment that in this scenario the British economy would take a battering, and possibly slip into recession. Projections make for dismal reading and include a GDP depreciation of 9%, a drastic fall in house prices and a possible run on the pound. For most this is nothing new. Ardent remainers remind us of these forecasts on a daily basis, appearing to revel in the delivery of such gloomy predictions - project fear showing it has legs yet. Less, on the other hand, tends to be said of the damaging effects a ‘disorderly exit’ would have on the 27 remaining EU member states. Indeed, for those countries with high levels of integration with the UK economy, these effects could be severe. Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany stand out among those most at risk. Below we take a closer look at what each country can expect if, come March 31st, Britain leaves the EU with no withdrawal agreement in place, and reverts to WTO tariffs to regulate its trade. Ireland Worst affected of the EU27 countries is likely to be Ireland because of the highly integrated nature of the Irish and UK economies. Annually, Irelands’ trade with the UK is worth an estimated €65 billion, and sustains over 400,000 jobs on both islands. For this reason, the imposition of steep WTO tariffs on this trade; the huge increase in customs paperwork; and the risk of long delays on goods and shipments to and from the European mainland has got Irish businesses frantically preparing for the worst. And their fears seem to arranted. Only recently, the IMF predicted that Dublin would suffer a 4% hit to its GDP. Mainly, this is because two of the country’s top exports – meat and dairy products – would face some of the highest tariffs, as per WTO instruction. The price increase would be absorbed by the consumer and massively reduce the products’ competitiveness, meaning profits would tumble and businesses falter. Commenting on the consequences of no deal, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, Phillip Lane, warned that ‘the agri-food sector would be disproportionately affected, with a corresponding outsized [negative] impact on rural regions, especially near the Border.’ The economic damage, he cautioned, although unevenly distributed, would also likely be ubiquitous, every area of economic activity enduring at least some disruptive effects. And this, of course, is before even mentioning the backstop. The European Commission has made it clear that no deal would make the creation of a hard border unavoidable. There is widespread fear that anything but a soft border could destabilise Ireland’s highly sensitive peace process – a hard border compared, by one leading expert, as like re-opening a ‘gaping wound’. Netherlands Britain is the Netherlands' third-biggest trading partner and also stands to take a significant economic hit. A study from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development expects exports to Britain to fall by 17% if no withdrawal agreement is secured. Research published by the Dutch Court of Audit has fleshed out these claims, estimating that this would cost the Netherlands an estimated €2.3 billion by 2023. Acute disruption would be especially felt in port cities like Rotterdam whose docks, rail yards and warehouses handle nearly 1 million tonnes of goods moving to and from Britain every week. With increased customs inspections shipping and logistics companies are predicting that what currently takes a day to get to Britain could, post-Brexit, take almost two. For a system in which margins of error are customarily measured in minutes, this is a dramatic increase, and there is concern that the roads leading to the ports will quickly come to look like parking lots. At present, there is no overflow space for trucks unable to drive straight onto ships. Belgium Neighbouring Belgium is also bracing itself. Former Minister Johan Van Overtveldt has been explicit in his warnings, explaining: 'Belgium is the fourth exporter, in nominal amounts, into the UK, on a par with France, which is a much bigger country. And so, if Brexit goes the wrong way, in terms of the hard Brexit, it will hurt the Belgian economy very seriously.’ The Belgian government has told businesses that a no-deal Brexit could lead to the imposition of up to €2.2bn (£1.96bn) in extra tariffs on goods and the loss of more than 40,000 jobs. It intends to present a series of emergency Brexit legislation to parliament before the end of February to avoid any further Belgium’s finance minister, Alexander de Croo, has complained that the British need to finally decide what they actually want from negotiations. 'Over the last few months we’ve fallen from one surprise into another,' he said in an interview with radio-station De Ochtend. 'The only constant is that the British are masters at shooting themselves in the foot and creating associated chaos.' The scale of that potential chaos he made clear claiming that only 5,000 of the 25,000 Belgian companies that trade with Britain were ready for the customs checks that could follow Brexit. How this deficit will be handled remains to be seen. Germany Even the economic powerhouse Germany will face trouble. Currently, the country exports an array of industrial goods to Britain, including around 800,000 cars per year - 14% of all cars it produces domestically - which accounts for 20% of the country’s global exports. No deal would jeopardise at least 100,000 jobs, and economists have calculated that 15,000 workers in the German car industry - t close to one in ten - could be made redundant if WTO tariffs sprang up in Britain. The blow would be felt across much of the country but it would probably concentrate on high-tech manufacturing centres such as Wolfsburg, the home of Volkswagen, and Böblingen, a suburb of Stuttgart where Siemens and IBM are the leading employers. In a potential sign of things to come, the flow of German products to the UK has fallen between 6-8% since the Brexit referendum.
The Brexit clock is now deafening, and the British political and media establishments seem utterly consumed by its inexorable ticking. In the public realm, little else is considered, even less discussed. And yet, despite this obsession, with just 42 days before Britain departs the European Union, negotiations for a withdrawal agreement remain in deadlock, and the hopes of breakthrough seem to be fading. At the core of the dispute is the Irish backstop and, by proxy, participation in a customs union. On both, neither the Conservatives nor Labour appears capable of sincere compromise, favouring, instead, a game of high-risk brinksmanship. The stakes: the future of the country. By using the approaching deadline as leverage, aimed to cow opposition, Prime Minister Theresa May is gambling, big. And at the point of writing, it's unclear who will hold their nerve. Without concessions being made, Britain will crash out of the EU with no deal, with World Trade Organisation (WTO) tariffs beckoning.
Urban, Rural and Transportation Economics (JEL R)
No Deal Brexit and the Threat to Developing Countries
Chances of a Brexit deal fade Prime Minister Theresa May continues, with almost admirable obstinacy, to defy political convention, staggering on apparently blind to the repeated failures of her ailing administration. Her political capital on this issue has long been exhausted, a fact hammered home by the record-breaking rejection of her withdrawal agreement in Parliament – the last in a long series of nails in her coffin. It now seems highly unlikely that a May-led government could get any kind of Brexit deal through Parliament, such is her tarnished reputation. And for this reason, the dreaded 'no deal' edges closer, simply because anything else seems so improbable. Everything But Arms Developing countries have been watching this process as one would a slow-motion car crash: with a mixture of terror, powerlessness, and morbid fascination. Their concern revolves around the Everything But Arms (EBA) agreement, which currently permits the 49 Least Developed Countries to export to the European Union, duty and quota-free, with the exception - as the name indicates - of armaments. The initiative came into force in 2001 with the aim to encourage the development of the world’s poorest economies. Since its inception, it has been widely commended for ‘levelling of the playing field’. The simulations don't look good Brexit, however, threatens its practice. In both hard exit and a 'no deal' scenarios these vulnerable states would be denied access to the UK market through EBA, and the consequences, in some cases, could be dire. Simulations run by the German Development Institute (GDI), published earlier this month, have shown the impact various forms of Brexit would have on countries outside of Europe. In its results, Cambodia is forecast to take the 'heaviest blow'. At present, it sends 7.7% of its exports – mostly garments and footwear - to the UK. Kristen Hopewell, a lecturer at Edinburgh University, predicts that in the case of no deal and a reversion to World Trade Organisation rules, the country would simply be ‘priced out of the market’, becoming ‘collateral damage in the Brexit process’. As a result of increased tariffs, Cambodia’s GDP is projected to fall by 1.04%, and household consumption by 1.4%. The effects of this would be stark: the proportion of Cambodians living in extreme poverty would increase by around 1%, equating to over 150,000 people. Ethiopia is expected to endure a similar fate following a no deal. Its main exports coffee and vegetables would struggle to compete in the British market without the preferential treatment the EBA ensures. Competition from advanced economies would significantly diminish the UK demand for Ethiopian goods – a phenomenon generally known as ‘the trade destruction effect’. Estimates suggest this decline in trade, given the country’s economic dependence on the UK, would plunge an additional 1.12% of Ethiopians into extreme poverty. Bangladesh also stands to be hit hard, according to the report. Goods sold to Britain make up 9% of the country’s exports, the large majority of which are Ready Made Garments (RMG). Hannah Timmis, a researcher at the Center for Global Development, has predicted that under WTO regulations the already stricken country would see a $400,000,000 reduction in its exports - a huge blow to a fragile economy. Millions could be plunged into poverty Overall, the GDI simulation estimates that a 'no deal' Brexit could ‘increase the population living in extreme poverty in the EBA countries by nearly 1.7 million’. And this shocking assessment is actually thought to be a conservative one, because it does not take into consideration the knock-on effects of a damaged UK economy. British economic downturn, for instance, is likely to decrease state aid, foreign investment and remittances, all, at the very least, in the short term. Many of the EBA countries are dependant on these sources of income for the maintenance of already-stretched systems of welfare and other vital national infrastructure. Without contingency plans, the consequences could be deadly. It is unsurprising that there is such concern. The government response Of course, it is possible that the UK government could act to ward off such outcomes, and pass legislation to replicate the EBA agreement, a process that would have to be carried out on a country-by-country basis, and, to avoid disruption and the diversion of trade away from developing countries, be secured by the 29 March. The general consensus is that these trade agreements will eventually be struck, as even outside of the humanitarian concern the UK’s economy also heavily relies on this business. What is far more doubtful is whether they will be reached on time. On this the GDI is sceptical, stating the ‘UK may draw up new free trade agreements with individual developing countries, but that is unlikely given the short notice and [if it did] it would limit the number of countries covered.’ There also exists the belief that as Britain has shown such flagrant disregard for its own economic welfare – a no deal would epitomise this – it would be irresponsible to expect it to treat others any differently. This, perhaps, is too cynical. People’s lives are reliant on UK trade. And it must be this that is at the centre of the decision making process. All must be done to avoid missing the 29th March deadline, and if that is not possible, then to strike deals as quickly as is possible. Unfortunately, in the uncertainty and unpredictability of current moment, nothing can be guaranteed.
In the cacophony of the Brexit debate the names Phnom Penh, Dhaka and Addis Ababa, if ever spoken, are rarely heard. And yet, with the March deadline looming on the not-too-distant horizon, and little, if anything, seemingly agreed upon, it is they who stand to be most affected, particularly if a no deal comes to pass. And things in that regard are not looking good.