Author: David Legge
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Dividends payments soar globally as worker pay stagnates
By Phillip Inman in the Guardian 1 May 2025 Shareholders have proved to be more successful at securing bumper payouts than workers have at winning higher pay, according to two studies that show dividends outstripping wages by a considerable margin in recent years. Oxfam said analysis of global data showed that dividend payments to shareholders over the…
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Corporate Medicine 2.0 — Special Purpose AcquisitionCompanies in the United States
By Nishant Uppal and Zirui Song, published in NEJM, 10 April 2024 Acquisitions of U.S. health care entities by private equity firms have come under scrutiny. But the back end of corporate acquisitions — the exit strategy — has remained largely ignored, despite arguably being more important in the long run. Private equity firms typically…
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Water Flowing Upwards: Net financial flows from developing countries
from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh on Real-World Economics Review blog, 1 May 2024, originally published in the Business Line on April 29, 2024 Once again, low and middle income countries (LMICs) are at the brutal receiving end of the fickle trajectory of international capital flows. As Figure 1 indicates, net financial flows to such countries, which…
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Mazzucato’s Mission economy: a moonshot guide to changing capitalism
Book Review by Mark Howard, published in Review of Radical Political Economics (22 April 2024). [Mariana Mazzucato served as chair of WHO’s Council on the Economics of Health for All. See Final Report (May 2023). Howard’s assessment of her approach to ‘changing capitalism’ is relevant to an appreciation of the report to WHO. – DGL]…
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Looming debt crisis, deepening inequality, lack of investment in climate mitigation and adaptation: UN Trade and Development calls for structural reform
Globally, in the first quarter of 2024, economic growth is slowing; private investment is stagnant, income inequality is increasing; and consumption expenditure is increasingly sustained by private borrowing. The UN Trade and Development Report Update (April, 2024) is a ‘must read’ for understanding the structure and direction of the global economy. Higher interest rates in…
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Capitalism is the single greatest source of violence
By Jason Hickel, from Pearls and Irritations, 23 April 2024 What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the “Cold War” was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation…
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Global South Stagnating under Heavier Debt Burden (Jomo Kwame Sundaram)
Much higher interest rates – due to Western central banks – are suffocating developing nations, especially the poorest, causing prolonged debt distress and economic stagnation. US Fed-induced stagnation After the greatest US Fed-led surge in international interest rates in more than four decades, developing countries spent $443.5 billion to service their external government and government-guaranteed debt in…
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Farmers’ Protest in India Reignites: A Struggle for the Future of Food and Agriculture
Colin Todhunter in Dissident Voice, February 18th, 2024. // In 2021, after a year-long protest, India’s farmers brought about the repeal of three farm laws that were intended to ‘liberalise’ the agriculture sector. Now, in 2024, farmers are again protesting. The underlying issues and the facilitation of the neoliberal corporatisation of farming that sparked the…
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Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, DecolonialThinking, and Global Coloniality
RAMÓN GROSFOGUEL, TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1), 2011 Can we produce a radical anti-systemic politics beyond identity politics?1 Is it possible to articulate a critical cosmopolitanism beyond nationalism and colonialism? Can we produce knowledges beyond Third World and Eurocentric fundamentalisms? Can we overcome the traditional dichotomy between political-economy and…
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Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage
Tricontinental, 23 January 2024 It has been a scant 30 years since the ‘end of history’ was declared by bourgeois ideologists in pantomimes of wish-fulfilment for sensing the inviolability of United States imperialism. For peoples’ struggles and movements feeling the boot of imperialism on their necks, no such end was in sight. In the face…
