by Alex Evans | Aug 2, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
The perennially popular board game Monopoly is a reasonable simulacrum of capitalism. At the beginning of the game, players move around a commons and try to privatise as much as they can. The player who privatizes the most invariably wins.
But Monopoly has two features currently lacking in American capitalism: all players start with th same amount of capital, and all receive $200 each time they circle the board. Absent these features, the game would lack fairness and excitement, and few would choose to play it.
Peter Barnes in the superb Capitalism 3.0. Go buy.
by Alex Evans | Aug 1, 2010 | North America
“I have this gnawing feeling about the future of America. When people lose the sense of optimism, things tend to get more volatile. The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years.”
– Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, quoted in Ed Luce’s outstanding FT Magazine article yesterday on the crisis of middle-class America.
by Michael Harvey | Jul 30, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, North America, South Asia, UK
– Over at The Diplomat, Thomas Wright explores how China’s self-confidence in initial relations with the Obama administration may prove the “catalyst for a more competitive – and geopolitically savvy – US multilateralism.” Der Spiegel, meanwhile, highlights the extent of Chinese soft power, while Charles Grant sees a chance to enhance the EU’s relations with the emerging superpower.
– Focusing on Chinese domestic society, the Economist highlights the growing activism and changing dynamics of the country’s vast labour force, with its associated implications for the global economy. Analysis over at VoxEU, meanwhile, assesses evidence of a potential Chinese property bubble.
– Elsewhere, with David Cameron back from his visit to India, Adrian Hamilton and Geoffrey Wheatcroft offer their views on his approach to international affairs. Kim Sengupta meanwhile remarks that the new Prime Minister “has started his foreign policy journey with a series of very deliberate steps”.
– Finally, Sir John Sulston talks to the New Scientist about the implications of global population change for sustainable development – the subject of a new initiative that he’s leading for The Royal Society. Prospect Magazine‘s blog, meanwhile, highlights favourable demographic trends in the developing world, while figures this week confirm that the EU’s population has now passed the 500 million mark.
by Alex Evans | Jul 28, 2010 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIRBqXkEy88[/youtube]
by Alex Evans | Jul 28, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Someone at the World Bank just leaked the FT’s Javier Blas a draft copy of a report on ‘landgrabs’ that was due to come out in August (the leaker apparently wanted to prevent the Bank from publishing the report when everyone was off on holiday). According to Javier,
Investors in farmland are targeting countries with weak laws, buying arable land on the cheap and failing to deliver on promises of jobs and investments, according to the draft of a report by the World Bank.
“Investor interest is focused on countries with weak land governance,” the draft said. Although deals promised jobs and infrastructure, “investors failed to follow through on their investments plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the local resource base”.
In addition, “the level of formal payments required was low”, making speculation a key motive for purchases. “Payments for land are often waived … and large investors often pay lower taxes than smallholders … or none at all.”
The full report will be worth a close look when it everntually comes out. I’ve been working on land and food issues with the Bank in recent months (though not with the department working on this report), and they’ve been doing a lot of good analysis – including some pretty alarming maps I’ve seen that show (a) community land and (b) land access deals. Guess what? They overlap massively.
Interestingly, the World Bank draft apparently enthuses about the idea of developing a ‘Land Transparency Initiative’ – kind of like an EITI for land. I’ll be interested to hear what Global Witness make of that – but have to admit that my default position will be with the critics referred to in the FT article who point out that “eight years after its launch, only Liberia, Timor-Leste and Azerbaijan, were full members of the EITI”.
Sure, it’s worth exploring international standards like this. But let’s be clear: the battle for fair access to land and water will really take place at country level, between those that stand to be winners and those that stand to be losers in a world of growing scarcity – and let’s not forget that in many countries, it’s the home government, rather than overseas investors, that’s the most voracious grabber of land.
