Be outraged: there are alternatives

Pushed to extremes, austerity is bad economics, bad arithmetic, and ignores the lessons of history. We, an international group of economists and social scientists, are outraged at the narrow range of austerity policies which are bringing so many people around the world to their knees, especially in Europe. Austerity and cutbacks are reducing growth and worsening poverty. In our professional opinions, there are alternatives – for Britain, Europe and all countries that currently imagine that government cutbacks are the only way out of debt. The low-growth, no-growth trap means that the share of debt in GNP falls ever more slowly, if at all. It may even rise – as it has in some countries

The Concept of Governance in the Spirit of Capitalism

Through combining insights from political economy and sociology, this article explains the early genesis of the policy notion of governance in relation to ideological changes in capitalism. Such an approach has tended to be neglected in existing conceptual histories, in the process, undermining a sharper politicization of the term and how it became normalized. The argument dissects how the emergence of governance can be understood in light of a relationship between political crises, social critique and justificatory arguments (centered around security and justice claims) that form part of an ideological ‘spirit of capitalism’. Through a distinctive comparison between the creation of ‘corporate governance’ in the 1970s and the formulation of a ‘governance agenda’ by the World Bank from the 1980s, the article elucidates how the concept, within certain policy uses, but by no means all, can reflect and help constitute a neoliberal spirit of capitalism

Macrosocial determinants of population health in the context of globalization

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/55738/1/florey_globalization_2007.pd

Food Price Volatility over the Last Decade in Niger and Malawi: Extent, Sources and Impact on Child Malnutrition

Recently, considerable attention has rightly been paid to the nutritional impact of the sharp hikes in international food prices which took place in 2007-8 and, again, in 2010-11. While sacrosanct, this growing focus has somewhat obscured the effect of other factors which do affect malnutrition in the Sub-Saharan Africa context, i.e. the long term impact of agricultural policies, huge and persistent seasonal variation in domestic food prices, and the impact of famines which still regularly stalk the continent. This paper focuses on the relative weight of these factors in explaining child malnutrition (proxied by the number of child admissions to feeding centers) in Malawi and Niger, two prototypical countries in the region. The analysis shows that the drivers of domestic food staple prices and of the ensuing child malnutrition have to be found not only – or not primarily – in the changes of international food prices but mainly in the impact of agricultural policies on food production, the persistence of a strong food price seasonality, and recurrent and often poorly attended famines. Indeed, even during years of declines in international food prices, these factors often exert a huge upward pressures on domestic food prices and child malnutrition