PEH Blog

Category: Analysis

  • Trade disputes over IP and health

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    Thanks to KEI for sharing the following references on trade related bullying. Time-line of Disputes over Compulsory Licensing  and Parallel Importation in South Africa, 1994 to 1999. http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/sa/sa-timeline.txt Susannah Markandya, Timeline of Trade Disputes involving Thailand and access to medicines, July 23, 2001   (Timeline entries from 1979 to 2001). http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/c/thailand/thailand.html Susannah Markandya, Timeline of disputes…

  • The Collapse of Neoliberal Privatisation

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    By C P Chandreasekhar on IDEAs 19 April 2024 Thames Water, one of England’s many regional water monopolies, infamously privatised by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and symbolising the dramatic turn in economic policy that neoliberalism implied, is finally collapsing. Unable to mobilise £500 million from shareholders who have milked the company over years, Kemble…

  • Africa’s Debt Crisis needs a Political Fix, contend experts

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    By Meera Srinivasan, on IDEAs, 20 April 2024 Ghana’s women vendors and hawkers are hard to miss. Attired in bright colours and bold prints, they walk swiftly on capital Accra’s streets, bearing baskets with various items on their heads, as infants wrapped in cloth carriers sit clasping their shoulders. As key contributors to the country’s…

  • Water Flowing Upwards: Net financial flows from developing countries

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    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…

  • Capitalism is the single greatest source of violence

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    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…

  • Intellectual Property, tool of colonialism

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    Text originally published in Portuguese on Feb 27th 2024. The idea that white Europeans could go out and colonize the rest of the world was based on the premise that there was an enlightened humanity that needed to reach the darkened humanity, bringing it into this incredible light. This call to the heart of civilization…

  • Farmers’ Protest in India Reignites: A Struggle for the Future of Food and Agriculture

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    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…

  • Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage

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    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…

  • World Bank Enables Foreign Aid Theft

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    Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Jan 17 2024 (IPS) – World Bank aid encourages governments to enable illicit financial outflows to offshore tax havens by reducing capital controls, thus draining precious foreign exchange and government resources. Aiding elite wealthAid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centres known for banking…

  • Neocolonial ISDS, Abused, Biased, Costly, and Grossly Unfair

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    Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Feb 7 2024 (IPS) – Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in international trade and investment agreements – long abused by opportunists with means – are slowly being rejected by cautious governments. Developing country governments need to be much more wary of ISDS and its implications, and should urgently withdraw from existing commitments. They…