PSI blog on the Financial Crisis

G8: 'Just Invest in Women'

Investment in the health and the rights of girls and women can help economic recovery, civil society groups are telling G8 leaders.

The big issues on the G8 agenda - food security, poverty, climate change and global health - are all connected to gender equality, they say. Many think investment in women is itself a solution.

"If we invest in women, many problems will be solved," Sylvia Borren, co- chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) told IPS.

Full text here: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47580

G8 leaders fail to reach agreement on global crisis

US President Barack Obama spoke of a historic consensus on environmental policy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that “considerable progress” had been made at the summit. In fact, most of the decisions announced over the past three days were vague and non-committal. In general, they marked a retreat from positions agreed (and not carried out) at preceding G8 summits.

Full text here: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/g8su-j11.shtml

The G8 L'Aquila summit - TUAC Evaluation

Click here to access the TUAC evaluation of the outcome of the G8 L’Aquila Summit. The TUAC evaluation exists in both English and French. The evaluation contains links to the major Summit statements. Click here to access the document: http://www.tuac.org/en/public/e-docs/00/00/05/1A/document_doc.phtml

G8: Trade Unions Response to Summit Conclusions

The Global Unions’ statement to the G8 L’Aquila Summit ”Putting Jobs and Fairness at the Heart of Recovery: the Role of the G8”, called on governments to confront the jobs, climate and development crises, as working families around the world suffer the effects of the errors of the financial elites.

Instead, the summit’s economic statement “Responsible Leadership for a Sustainable Future” covers a vast range of issues, failing to prioritise the actions that need to be taken to move out of this triple crisis.

“The commitments on employment and social protection are positive, as is the more extensive role given to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the recognition of the worldwide relevance of the tripartite ‘Global Jobs Pact’. But there are no explicit commitments to making the necessary resources available for achieving employment and social protection goals, although the focus on the need to protect the tax base represents a welcome step in this direction,” said OECD-TUAC General Secretary John Evans, who represented the ITUC, TUAC and Global Union Federations at the summit.

Click here to access the press statement reacting to the outcome: http://www.tuac.org/en/public/e-docs/00/00/05/17/document_news.phtml

Towards a Renewed Debt Crisis?

Risk Profiles of the poorest countries in the light of the global economic slowdown

The FES has just published a paper on the threat of a new debt crisis among low-income countries.

Much of the debate on the global financial and economic crisis has focused on the advanced industrialized economies, although it is now increasingly recognized that developing countries are severely affected by the crisis. Quite contrary to the supposed decoupling of the growth dynamic in developing countries from the global economic cycle, developing countries are affected by the current crisis via several transmission channels, such as a decline in exports, falling commodity prices, reduction in remittances, currency depreciations, reduced or even reversed capital inflows and investment as well as reduced availability of credit.

Jürgen Kaiser, Irene Knoke and Hartmut Kowsky argue in this paper that the shortcomings in multilateral debt control and relief mechanisms are amplified by the financial crisis. Thus, a new round of debt crises among Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) is most likely to occur.

They also provide a detailed debt default risk assessment for HIPC countries which - among other indicators - takes the effects of climate change into account.
The 68-page paper contains individual country profiles for 24 countries in Africa and Central & South America.

 The FES paper “Towards a Renewed Debt Crisis?” by Jürgen Kaiser, Irene Knoke and Hartmut Kowsky, DoG Occasional Paper N° 44, FES Berlin, June 2009, can be found here: http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/global/06444.pdf

All publications from the Dialogue on Globalization series can be found here: http://www.fes-globalization.org/

Financial crisis can create social, political unrest, warns UN

Millions of people across the world are on the verge of plunging into poverty and unemployment, leading to social and political unrest, mainly in developing countries like India and Brazil, UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon warned Tuesday in the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) report.

“We have made important progress in this effort (achieving the MDGs), and have many successes on which to build. But we have been moving too slowly to meet our goals, and today we face a global economic crisis whose full repercussions have yet to be felt. At the very least, it will throw us off course, particularly in developing countries,” Ban said in the forward to the report.

Full text here: http://www.sindhtoday.net/news/1/28081.htm

The clamour to cut public sector pay is based on myth

State incomes remain comparably low – calls for a freeze can't distract us from the real issue: outlandish executive pay.

The hue and cry has begun: cut, cut and cut again. Where to begin? With the pay of the 6 million public sector workers, naturally. The head of the Audit Commission has called for a pay freeze across the board, which amounts to a real cut with inflation running at 2%. A rumbling campaign to squeeze the gold-plated, feather-bedded public workforce has been led until now by the TaxPayers' Alliance, using conveniently deceptive figures.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/06/public-sector-private-pay

The wrath of the public sector

If public sector workers decide they should not have to pay for a crisis they did not create, a flood of anger will swamp Labour

The inevitable has now begun to happen. After bailing out the financial system and the wider economy with more than £1tn of public money in the last year, the chancellor, Alistair Darling, has now stated he's considering a public sector pay freeze.

Full text here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/06/public-sector-workers-anger-crisis

Myths behind attacks on public sector workers

New figures out this week prove that it is an “urban myth” that public sector workers are having an easy ride compared to those in the private sector.

The people at the top of society advocating a pay freeze for public sector workers claim that this has to be done because wages in the private sector are falling dramatically.

It is only fair, they say, that workers in the public sector take some of the pain.

Politicians, bosses and media pundits are trying to create a mythical divide between public sector workers – with their supposed “gold-plated” pay and pensions – and put upon private sector workers, struggling to survive.

But the people who deliver vital public services – such as nurses, refuse workers, firefighters and millions of others – face low pay and long hours, just like their colleagues in the private sector.
And if the government gets away with cutting the wages of these workers, it will embolden private bosses to increase attacks in that sector.

It is clear that whoever wins the next general election intends to carry out a bonfire of public services. Unions need to fight now to defend the services that millions of people rely on, especially during a deep economic crisis.

Full text here: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=18425

Pope Criticizes World Economic System, Urges Social Responsibility

Pope Benedict XVI criticized the international economic system and called for a new global structure based on social responsibility, concern for the dignity of the worker and a respect for ethics.

"Today's international economic scene, marked by grave deviations and failures, requires a profoundly new way of understanding human enterprise," Benedict wrote in his latest encyclical, which is the most authoritative document a pope can issue. "Without doubt, one of the greatest risks for business is that they are almost exclusively answerable to their investors, thereby limited in their social value."

More here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/07/AR2009070700656.html?hpid=topnews