Karl Marx had once said that all criticism must begin with the criticism of religion. Paraphrasing Marx one can say in the current economic context that all criticism must begin with the criticism of the GDP. This conceptually and statistically…
Extended by a day in a show of symbolism, this year’s climate summit, the 29th Conference of Parties (COP29), ended in collapse. The widespread consensus that this was the case concealed, however, differences as to what reflected the collapse. Developed…
There’s no doubt that the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States sets the stage for further expansion of fossil fuel production in the US, especially of natural gas, of which the US has emerged…
The Kazan summit of the BRICS countries was a historic one for several reasons: first, it created a new category called “partner nations” as a step towards full membership, and accepted 13 such new “partner” countries, among whom were Cuba…
For some time now, global economic news reporting has been dominated by the growth slowdown in China. The tone of that reporting is conflicted. On the one hand, there is a barely suppressed sense of satisfaction or “schadenfreude” (pleasure derived…
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize, the Nobel for “Economic Sciences”, has always been controversial. This is true of the 2024 award to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson as well. Typically, the economics Nobel is awarded to mainstream economists for…
Several international organisations are now engaged in the business of measuring what they call “poverty”. The World Bank has been in it for some time, but now we have a new measure of “Multidimensional Poverty” brought out by the UNDP…
The latest World Employment and Social Outlook Report (update for September 2024) from the International Labour Organisation highlights some disturbing trends. Importantly, it identifies a significant decline and then stagnation in the share of labour income in GDP, for the world as…
In early October, in a show of pique, a European Commission proposal to impose additional tariffs of up to 35.3 per cent (on top of the pre-existing 10 per cent) on electrical vehicles (EVs) imported from China, was passed by…
The “inevitable striving of finance capital”, Lenin had written in Imperialism, (is) “to enlarge its spheres of influence and even its actual territory”. He was writing of course in a world marked by inter-imperialist rivalry, where this striving took the…
