Trade, employment and development: Back on track?

Richard Kozul-Wright

In today’s world of increased economic and political interdependence achieving a broad-based, rapid and sustained growth in incomes and employment involves even more complex policy challenges than in the past. This was the case before the recent crisis, but it is even more so as policy makers in both developed and developing countries look for ways to mitigate the damage from that crisis and build a more sustainable recovery.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) worries that the kind of integrated policy framework and the accompanying degree of policy coherence required to respond effectively to the crisis within and across countries is still not in place. In particular, the kind of mutually supporting links between macroeconomic policies, social protection systems and active labour market measures are still not established to ensure both an inclusive (job-rich) recovery and to realize the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) within an acceptable time frame.

Talking about an Energy and Jobs Revolution

Kumi Naidoo
© Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Greenpeace

Creating decent new jobs, fighting poverty and curbing catastrophic climate change have historically been seen as three distinctive challenges, pursued by a trio of different movements: trade unions, development organizations and environmentalists. This should no longer be the case. In the past few years, as climate change has become ever more of a pressing issue and the international financial institutions have once again proved incapable of creating employment or fighting poverty, people and organizations have realized that it is in our collective interest as citizens of the world to pursue a green industrial policy. This should start with a re-evaluation of the way we produce and distribute energy.

Greenpeace's Energy [R]evolution, developed in conjunction with over 30 scientists and engineers worldwide, proposes a radical shift in the way the world produces, distributes, and ultimately consumes energy. It is a roadmap for moving energy production closer to the point of use. Under the current system, we produce large amounts of energy at a few centralised locations and send that energy over very long distances to where it is consumed. This system is inflexible, often wasteful, and leaves large swathes of the world’s population unserved and without access to any energy.

Social forces drive financial insecurity

Seeraj Mohamed

The frequency of financial crises has increased and we are concerned about how soon to expect the next one. The liberalisation of cross border capital flows has increased the possibility not only of contagion from crises elsewhere but that financial profligacy in one country is easily exported to another. Economic policymakers have a duty to protect their country from contagion, global financial volatility and the domestic adoption of profligate financial practices by asserting policy sovereignty. The global trade union movement can play an important role by fighting for policies that limit the power of finance.

Civil society, including trade unions should campaign for economic policies that protect countries from financial crises and contagion. Global trade unions are well placed to co-ordinate these campaigns across countries. Widespread financial liberalisation leads to increased socio-economic insecurity and loss of jobs, factors which weaken the social fabric and create increased hardship for the poor. The rich are able to diversify their investment portfolios and move their wealth abroad if necessary. They can weather the storms of financial instability and crises while the poor are stuck in the eye of the storm.

On the urgency of stopping global warming

Willi Semmler

Christian Schoder

Parts of the labour movement still have strong reservations towards measures aimed at reducing the carbon intensity of production in order to mitigate global warming. The public debate is dominated by fears that environmental policies harm the working population in the North as well as in the South by increasing unemployment. In line with this public opinion, governments are reluctant to implement mitigation policies on the national or international level. They impose market-based abatement regimes which are in line with orthodox economic theory but ineffective in practice. In this article, we want to rebut these concerns by pointing out that global warming may follow a self-enforcing pattern which is increasingly costly to reverse, thus harming the world's population more and more. Moreover, we argue that mitigation policies may have a positive impact on employment if done properly. After discussing different mitigation policies, we conclude with the policy recommendation of immediate and ambitious action.

Paying for Inequality: The Costs of NAIRU-based Macroeconomics

Servaas Storm

C.W.M. Naastepad

Mainstream macroeconomics is in a deep crisis in the wake of the financial collapse of mid-2007 and the ensuing Great Recession. What the crisis has revealed is that the remarkable macroeconomic performance of the US and the UK from 1995 to 2006 was just a façade. Hiding behind it, a mountain of unsecured credit and housing debt was accumulating, as a constantly expanding network of secondary markets seemed to be sharing the risk created by such debt, apparently diminishing the risk exposure of individual holders. How that debt mountain collapsed is well known. Mainstream economists did not in any way foresee the crisis, bringing out the failure of the orthodoxy of an entire era in economic thought, teaching, practice and policy advice. As Citigroup’s chief economist Willem Buiter writes (in the Financial Times): “the typical graduate macroeconomics and monetary economics training received at Anglo-American universities, during the past 30 years or so, may have set back by decades serious investigations of aggregate economic behaviour and economic policy-relevant understanding. It was a privately and socially costly waste of resources.” We believe that the theory of the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), which belongs to the core of graduate macroeconomics and monetary economics, is seriously implicated in creating the crisis. NAIRU theory helped shape the broader macroeconomic conditions within which the spectacular macroeconomic imbalances could build up and eventually lead to collapse. The NAIRU approach must be discarded to provide the space for “serious investigations of aggregate economic behaviour”.