Finding a new globally acceptable tool to measure the ups and downs of our economic activity will remain a challenge – but one that must be tackled urgently to ensure the world’s economic recovery is on the right course.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/gdp-new-measure-economic-growth/
More than just a set of free-market policies, neoliberalism has always sought to alter society’s balance of power in favor of bosses. Its assault on democracy and undermining of unions is now playing straight into the hands of the far right.
Once the richest country in South America, Venezuela is now in deep economic crisis.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p051zkj8
But the world of work has changed, and that could be bad news for still-emerging countries like India, Indonesia, and Africa’s largest economies. Manufacturing, central to China’s boom over the past few decades, is now often performed by smart machines. New jobs for people often demand digital-age education and training that relatively few workers in poorer countries have access to.
https://www.gzeromedia.com/demography-and-destiny-blessing-or-time-bomb
The ideology underpinning neoliberal globalization demands that all markets and exchanges, large and small, global and local, be optimized for profit. This has been the mantra of corporate executives and elites for the past four decades. Empty hospital beds cost money. Local production is too expensive. Stockpiles of surgical masks and ventilators are a waste of money. Community hospitals in poor and rural counties won’t turn a profit, so they must be closed.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/is-this-the-end-of-neoliberal-globalization
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u15wh_L6g3Re5nBgzwZohhhPNhdwZ42H/view?usp=sharing
Overall freedom has also declined, though to a lesser degree, over the same time period. Of the 12 major categories that we measure in the report, all but five have seen some deterioration, with freedom of religion, identity and relationship freedoms, and the rule of law seeing the largest decreases.
https://www.cato.org/blog/personal-freedom-decline-worldwide-new-human-freedom-index
Yet this raises questions whether Duisburg – dubbed by local media as “Germany’s Chinese city” – is opening itself up to ethical compromises or reputational risk by so openly welcoming Chinese investment. The pressure Beijing exerts on foreign entities is increasing, at a time surveys show the German public is increasingly negative on Chinese investment. What price is paid to engage with China?
Great summary of a specific place affected by new infrastructure, the hopes and realities.
Locals are making money from tourism and are buying more yaks, Abbas says. This year, he began with 500 and sold all but 32. “People like it because they don’t eat anything other than grass,” he says, sounding more like a hipster butcher than a grime-streaked 23-year-old shepherd. Before the road was fixed, he was selling barely 15 a year, and was surviving on chai and bread.
The bustle is apparent in the nearby border town of Sost, where cargo trucks come from across Pakistan to collect Chinese imports processed at the local dry port. Dozens of men sit outside, waiting for dollar-a-day jobs unloading boxes. Mohammad Iqbal, a 29-year-old customs official, says that when he was growing up, “there was only one shop, only one hotel.”
An IB Global Politics Site 