Political Economy for Health Blog
Posts are by members of the Peoples Health Movement PEH Network. Anyone may comment but you will need to register before your first comment will be published.
This blogsite is a resource of the People’s Health Movement. Its purpose is to provide a platform for discussion of the applications of political economy to the struggle for health. (The People’s Charter for Health provides an overview of PHM’s analyses and objectives: the ‘struggle for health’).
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Australia gets nickel-and-dimed by Indonesian downstreaming
By James Guild in East Asia Forum on 11 June 2024 Despite soaring nickel prices between 2016 and 2022, Australian nickel miners, such as Wyloo Metals and BHP, have struggled due to a surge in market supply from Indonesia, the world’s largest nickel reserve holder, leading to a fall in nickel prices. While Australian miners…
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Financing Africa’s Climate Action
By Mukupa Nsenduluka & Rachel Etter-Phoya from Tax Justice Network 22 May 2024, here Africa has contributed the least to global warming, yet millions of African people are facing the most severe impacts of the climate crisis. To combat these challenges – stopping floodwaters, feeding starving people, and increasing the resilience of the public sector –…
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The ‘Billions to Trillions’ charade
By Jayati Ghosh, 27 May 2024, published first in Social Europe and then in IDEAs. The international-development sector has become fixated on calculating financing gaps. Hardly a day goes by without new estimates of the funds low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) need to meet their climate targets and achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals…
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What Comes After Neoliberalism?
A panel of commentators brought together by Project Syndicate (4 June 2024) including Mehrsa Baradaran, Anne O. Krueger, Mariana Mazzucato, Dani Rodrik, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and Michael R. Strain are asked to respond to “What comes after neoliberalism?” The steep tariff increases on Chinese goods that US President Joe Biden’s administration recently announced are just the latest in a long string…
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The Crisis of Liberalism
By Prabhat Patnaik in IDEAs (originally People’s Democracy) 13 May 2024 Each strand of political praxis is informed by a political philosophy which analyses the world around us, especially, in modern times, its economic characteristics. On the basis of this analysis, the particular political philosophy sets out the objectives which have to be struggled for,…
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Trade Liberalisation kicked away African Development Ladder
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram in IDEAS (originally IPS), 9 May 2024 Africans have long been promised trade liberalisation would accelerate growth and structural transformation. Instead, it has cut its modest production capacities, industry and food security. Berg helped sink Africa The 1981 Berg Report was long the World Bank blueprint for African economic reform. Despite lacking support…
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Services Exports as Growth Engine
Bt C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh in IDEAS, 14 May 2024 Interest in India’s almost unique success as a services exporter in global markets persists. India’s services export receipts rose from $95.8 billion in post-crisis year 2009-10 to $341.1 billion in 2023-24. Close to one half (47 per cent) of those exports were exports…
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The IMF and Class Struggle in Latin America: Unveiling the Role of the IMF
By David Barkin and Juan Santarcángelo in Monthly Review Online, 1 May 2024 Mainstream economics posits that the path to prosperity for developing countries is achieved through the implementation of a set of “free market” policies, which, among its principal measures, advocates for economic openness, market deregulation and liberalization, and privatization of public enterprises. Despite empirical evidence…
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Fuelling the future, poisoning the present: Myanmar’s rare earth boom
2022 Study revisited in 2024 and published 24 May 2024 by Global Witness In 2022, a Global Witness investigation revealed a shocking reality at the heart of the green energy transition. Unregulated mines in Myanmar had become an essential source of heavy rare earth elements (HREE), vital ingredients for the magnets used in electric vehicles (EV) and…
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Ian Angus’s “The War Against the Commons”: A vital new history of the bloody rise of capitalism
Review of The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism by Ian Angus, reviewed by Steve Leigh in Firebrand, republished by Monthly Review Online, 22 May 2024 In Marxist theory, primitive accumulation is, as Marx defined it in Capital Volume I, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of…
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