Advancing subsidy reforms: towards a viable policy package

Executive Summary: World subsidies may total some $800 billion, of which perhaps two-thirds occur in the developed economies of the OECD. Reforming subsidy regimes that damage the prospects for sustainable development is immensely complex. Simply calling for subsidy removal is unlikely to succeed. The complexity arises from the fact that subsidies are manifestations of rent-seeking, which, in turn is part of a wider category of unproductive activity in economic systems. Rentseeking involves redirecting economic resources to special interest groups rather than using resources productively. Interest groups then use those resources to reinforce their privleged positions. Subsidy reform will inevitably conflict with those special interests. The idea that subsidy reform is a ‘win-win’ policy is therefore misleading – there will always be losers, even if they are undeserving losers. In many cases, the most harmful subsidies will be those that are least easy to remove. Subsidy reform is therefore about dissipating rents, has to be part of a wider programme of macroeconomic and political reform. Subsidies are often linked to corruption, thus emphasising the difficulty of securing the political changes that are needed. Moreover, instituting democratic reform is not sufficient either: democratic societies have even larger subsidy regimes than less democratic societies. Political change has to be combined with economic reform. Some have advocated ‘sudden shocks’ whereby dramatic events are seized as an opportunity to institute reform. There is some evidence to suggest that if a crisis does occur, it may be best to implement subsidy reform along with other transitional measures in one large package. An alternative is to let the almost inevitable growth of subsidies produce economic bankruptcy, and then institute reform. But many societies have proved surprisingly resilient whilst sustaining extensive subsidy regimes, and the costs of waiting may not be acceptable anyway. In the absence of crisis, a gradual approach is best. Policies need to be pre-announced and gradual subsidy reduction needs to be combined with careful public awareness campaigns and efforts at political transparency and accountability. Bilateral and multilateral lenders have a strong role to play, even though reforming subsidies as part of a conditionality package is still controversial. Reform almost inevitably involves privatisation since exposure to market forces is essential for rent dissipation. Nonetheless, reform is complex and its success if difficult to guarantee: for example, privatisation may simply shift rents from the public to the private sector. Subsidy regimes seem peculiarly resilient to change

Embodied Experiences of Trans Pregnancy

Drawing on interview data from the international project Trans Pregnancy: An International Exploration of Transmasculine Practices of Reproduction this article explores embodied experiences of male, trans/masculine and non-binary pregnancy. Moving beyond the spectacle of the ‘pregnant’ man, our analysis builds on existing literature on trans health and embodiment in order to develop a deeper understanding of the lived, bodily complexities of trans pregnancy. We consider the strategies men, trans/masculine and non-binary folks engage in to manage gender presentation during pregnancy and the degree to which pregnancy disrupts the ability to control the presentation of gender. Our analysis contributes to the deconstruction of normative readings of the relationship between gender and the body and highlights the need for improvements in trans and non-binary reproductive healthcare

Transnormativity in the psy disciplines: Constructing pathology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and Standards of Care

The psy disciplines (i.e., psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy) have played a significant role in shaping understandings of transgender people’s lives in ways that are transnormative (i.e., by emphasizing one particular account of what it means to be transgender). This paper documents 1) how the rise of the psy disciplines created opportunities for transgender people to access treatment (but that such access often required tacit acceptance of transnormativity), and 2) how transgender people have resisted transnormative accounts within the psy disciplines. More specifically, this paper explores how both the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and what is now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care, have often enshrined highly regulatory accounts of transgender people’s lives, while also changing over time, in part due to the contributions of transgender people. The paper concludes by considering recent contributions by transgender people in terms of the use of informed consent models of care and clinical research, and highlights the ongoing marginalization of transgender people in terms of access to ethical, trans-competent care

A pragmatic approach to evaluate alternative indicators to GDP

The serious economic crisis broken out in 2008 highly stressed the limitations of GDP used as a well-being indicator and as a predictive tool for economy. This induced the need to identify new indicators able to link the economic prosperity of a country to aspects of sustainable development and externalities, both positive and negative, in the long run. The aim of this paper is to introduce a structured approach which supports the choice or the construction of alternative indicators to GDP. The starting point is the definition of what a well-being indicator actually should represent according to the Recommendations of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress. Then the paper introduces a systematic procedure for the analysis of well-being indicators. The different phases of this procedure entail the checking of indicators technical properties and their effect on the representational efficacy. Finally, some of the most representative well-being indicators drawn from the literature are compared and a detailed application example is propose