Economics

By Farhana Haque Rahman By any measure this has been a devastating year: fires across the Amazon, the Arctic and beyond; floods and drought in Africa; rising temperatures, carbon emissions and sea levels; accelerating loss of species, and mass forced…

The IMF is backing a tax reform bill in Ecuador that will enable capital flight and further austerity. Lara Merling for openDemocracy Over the past year, a rebranded IMF returned to Latin America with promises of loan agreements that would…

By Medea Benjamin Gloria Minor had been preparing her AirBnB in Havana for years, investing every penny her sister sent her from Miami in repairing and refurbishing her apartment.  With President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro re-establishing relations five years…

“It is Orwellian for Congress to hand over billions of dollars worth of weapons and bombs to a president waging a horrific, unconstitutional war in Yemen—and call that progressive.” By Jake Johnson, staff writer, Common Dreams More than 180 House…

As William Nordhaus illustrated in his Nobel award address in December last year, the free-rider problem is particularly severe for climate change. Those who do nothing ride free, while those who undertake costly reductions pay dearly. If an important player…

Despite global progress in tackling poverty, hunger and disease, a “new generation of inequalities” indicates that many societies are not working as they should, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) argues in its latest report released on Monday [9 December 2019]. …

During the UK election campaign the incumbent Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been criticised for repeatedly telling lies, and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for presenting an unrealistic set of economic policies. The latter criticism has now been debunked by a…

The Conservative Party used to look after big, nationwide businesses. Now it serves a finance industry based in a few small areas of the capital. Frances Coppola for openDemocracy Last Friday, openDemocracy revealed that a secretive group of business leaders…

By Howard Richards A compassionate realist acknowledges the positive social functions of delusions, of which there are many in CWP [Community Work Programme] at Orange Farm [a suburb of Johannesburg]: Delusions about how many jobs there are (“Many people are…

“If we measure the wrong thing,” warns Joseph Stiglitz, “we will do the wrong thing.” by Jon Queally, staff writer for Common Dreams Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is warning the world that unless the obsession many world leaders have…