Matias Vernengo
I have taken to calling my beliefs on the future of energy sources “weird energy.” Why? Because the sources I am most interested in seem to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Notice: this is so inviolable, we capitalize it. But they don’t.
Why am I so interested in other energy sources? The obvious reason is a quest for zero carbon intensity, so getting rid of the big greenhouse gas. The other one is that the correlation between energy consumption and economic output, no matter how you measure it, and probably no matter when in history you look, is so tight that you could hang wallpaper by it. Some folks think I am weird because of this but, ya’ know, data are data when used wisely. And this is really important.
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Martin Khor
A key threshold measuring the march of global warming was crossed recently, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere topped 400 parts per million.
On 10 May scientists announced that 400.03ppm had been measured at a climate-observing station in Hawaii that is often used as a benchmark. The global average is expected to cross the 400ppm mark in the next year.
This means that there in for every one million molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, there are 400 molecules of carbon dioxide.
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C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
In the desperate search for evidence that the global recession has bottomed out and the recovery has arrived, the story told by the long-term trend in unemployment levels and rates is being missed.
Early this year, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) had noted that the global unemployment rate was close to 6 per cent, implying that 197 million people were unemployed, even ignoring the 39 million who had dropped out of the workforce, discouraged by persistent failure in job search.
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Matias Vernengo
The expression of ‘dollarization’ has at least two different meanings. In the narrow sense, it refers to massive currency substitution, in which a country, most likely a developing one, supplements its domestic unit account of fiduciary reserve assets with a foreign currency, more often than not the United States dollar or, in some cases, the euro. Note that currency substitution could be complete and might even imply the elimination of a domestic token. Full dollarization in that sense has taken place in small countries, mostly in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific which are heavily dependent on the United States. Dollarization, in this sense, is the exemplification of a country foregoing its national ‘monetary sovereignty’ (Mundell 1961, p. 661).
In the broader sense, dollarization refers to US hegemony in the world economy as a result of the US dollar being the numeraire currency in international markets. This christens the United States as the premier international monetary authority that regulates and dictates the flows of international financial commitments for global economic activity. Of particular importance in this context is the fact that the key international commodities, including oil, are priced in US dollars in international markets. The former conception of dollarization can be described as dollarization strictu sensu, while the latter as latu sensu dollarization, i.e. not the specific use of the dollar by a country, but by the whole world economy—an international system in which the dollar is de facto a global fiat money.
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Jayati Ghosh
Since her death, many eulogies of Thatcher have spoken of her as a revolutionary. Thatcherism (along with the associated Reaganomics) is seen as a radical transformative agenda that changed the face of economy and society. But seen from the developing world decades later, much of this agenda appears familiar, in the form of structural adjustment policies that have been forced upon different countries at different times by international institutions.
Given the broad contemporaneity of these strategies, it is a moot point who “inspired” whom, or just how original those ideas were. But it is certainly true that they contributed to shaping policy dialogue in fundamental ways, and thereby left a continuing (if unfortunate) legacy. Consider just five significant elements of this legacy, most features of which are now found across the world and especially in developing countries.
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Martin Khor
It was almost like Penang – in the early seventies, that is.
The sea was not only green-blue in colour in the distance but crystal clear near the shore, the beach was pure white, and bright stars filled the clear sky at night.
On the road along the Coral Coast to the nearest small town there was hardly any traffic. Like the small winding road in Penang’s northern coast to Batu Ferringhi, before the coming of the high-rise apartment blocks and the big hotels.
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Aaron Schneider, Guest Blogger
For the first time in history, a perpetrator has been found guilty of genocide in a court in his or her own country. In 1982, General Efraín Rios Montt seized power in a coup and guided a counter-insurgency strategy of genocide against the Ixil Mayans of the Guatemalan highlands until a coup deposed him 17 months later.
In the civil conflict that tore this small Central American country apart, more than 2,50,000 of a population of 6.5 million are estimated to have been killed. The genocide of the Ixil Mayan population eliminated approximately five per cent of that ethnicity in Rios Montt’s short reign. For 30 years, he evaded justice, accused by various human rights and indigenous groups of war crimes but securing election as a member of Congress where he was granted parliamentary immunity from prosecution. Just under two years ago, he lost his seat for the first time, and human rights organisations and indigenous groups pressed for justice.
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