Author: David Legge
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Markets, power, and potatoes: An analysis of agricultural trade between Egypt and Europe
Despite Egypt’s substantial agricultural sector, it grapples with severe food insecurity, relying heavily on volatile global wheat imports. Climate change exacerbates threats to agriculture, impacting small-scale farming in North Africa. High poverty rates, worsened by the 2016 economic crisis, hinder nutrition improvement, especially for children. Egypt’s neoliberal agricultural policies prioritise profit, favouring large-scale farming and…
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An ocean drowning in capital: Oil, transnational actors and the ocean in Guyana
This issue brief (from the Transnational Institute, 13 Dec 2023) critically analyses Guyana’s ocean economy. Focused on oil and gas, it explores the three circuits of capital, emphasising the severe impacts of the booming oil and gas industry on marine environments and coastal communities. Through interviews, research, and consultation with diverse experts, the publication aims…
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Patrick Bond: Samir Amin’s diagnosis of worst-case racial capitalism
“Nothing has changed, South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced”. Published 11 November by Patrick Bond on CADTM. // Samir Amin’s critiques of both apartheid-era and post-apartheid political economy contributed to his scathing view of the crucial ‘semi-peripheral’ layer of the world system, a perspective typically ignored in binary formulations of Global North and Global South. Amin’s 1977…
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IPEF: New cold war weapon backfires
Ong Kar Jin and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, 15 November 2023. Originally published by IPS News and also on NetworkIdeas. / / US President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) is the economic arm of his administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, aimed at countering China’s influence in the region. Despite its lofty pronounced goals, IPEF’s shortcomings expose…
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Chronicles of Debt Crises Foretold
Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Originally published on Wiley Online Library, 5 Sept 2023. Also published on IDEAS Blog. / / The debt crises looming in developing countries are being exacerbated by changing debt composition. Declining net foreign exchange earnings have worsened their predicament. As concessional development finance declined, many governments turned to riskier…
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Health differentials associated with social inequality: description, explanation and strategy
The focus of this post is on the different uses of ‘social determinants’ and ‘social determination’ in describing, explaining and responding to the health differentials associated with social inequality. Background The level of health that a population can achieve is a function of their exposure to risk, their access to resources, and the distribution of…
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Class
Usage The term ‘class’ is used for widely different purposes. Researchers whose purpose is primarily descriptive (eg demographers or statisticians) tend to treat ‘class’ as a descriptive variable, often closely linked to household income or wealth. A spectrum from very rich to very poor is defined and the numbers and circumstances of households at different…
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Alienation
Usage This post explores the usefulness of alienation theory in bridging between the insights of political economy and the concerns of public health (Crinson and Yuill 2008). Alienation is not a real thing, out there; it is a conceptual framework for making sense of human experience. The term comes to contemporary usage from Roman law…
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Neoliberalism
Usages The term, ‘neoliberalism’, is required to carry a wide range of meanings; variously an ideological project, a political program, or an institutional configuration of governance (England and Ward 2007) Bell and Green (2016) comment that “When a concept can be used to describe such an extraordinary – and even downright contradictory – array of…
