The current remarkable surge in inflation is considered to be a nearly global phenomena (Reinhart and Lucker 2022), affecting both developed and developing nations. While there may be common drivers of inflation, such as factors associated with the Covid-19 pandemic followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there are considerable variations in the causes of it, especially with reference to developing countries, including Albania. Drawing on Kalecki’s (1976) Essays on Developing Economies, I argue that there are also domestic factors attributed to the increase in inflation that resides in the structural sectoral imbalances of the Albanian economy.
Rising prices in Albania sparked protests across the country in March 2022. The protests highlighted the rise in food prices which increased by more than 9% compared to March in the previous year; with the price of bread being the main contributor to such increase. With Albanians spending more than 42% of their total budget on food, rising prices of ‘necessities’ adds more pressure to the poor households to make ends meet. Nearly a quarter of Albanians, 640,000 people, already live in poverty (Kote 2022) and soaring prices in the economy could push people further into poverty. But what is pushing food prices to soar in a country where agricultural land accounts for 24% of overall land, a good Mediterranean climate, and water resources, all of which are crucial for agricultural development? Despite these favourable conditions, the productive capacity of Albania’s agriculture sector to meet domestic demand for food and feed meets is only one third (World Bank, 2022a).
The commodity supercycle of the 2000s and 2010s gave rise to a rich debate in the academic literature about the possibility for resource-rich countries to muster the primary commodity price bonanza for development. As in past debates on the rise of Asia as the ‘world’s factory’, industrial policy was once again at the forefront of discussion.
On the one hand, orthodox scholars insisted that the use of market distortions to channel resources towards industrialisation would be a risky gamble with little guarantee of success. Instead, as the Asian ‘tigers’ and China before them, developing countries would do well to make good use of the market to identify their comparative advantages. In this view, industrial policy continues to be inefficient and wasteful, especially as it creates plenty of opportunities for corruption rather than development. On the other hand, heterodox researchers argued that state intervention was crucial to divert resource rents to specific nascent industries that would never be able to withstand international competition without sustained support. As both the Asian ‘tigers’ and China more recently used robust industrial policy to develop globally competitive industries, developing countries should also use targeted policy intervention to ‘upgrade’ to higher value-added manufacturing for export.
Still, one question that eludes both orthodox and heterodox literature concerns why, for decades, multinational corporations would consistently invest in manufacturing in resource-rich countries such as, for instance, Argentina, Brazil, and Egypt. This has been the case despite the small scale and high costs of production in these markets (making them inefficient, per orthodox scholars), whose output is mostly sold domestically rather than exported (pace heterodox scholars).
In a recently published open access article in Competition & Change, I applied Argentinian scholar Juan Iñigo Carrera’s original elaboration on Marx to the under-researched case study of the car industry in Uzbekistan to answer precisely this question. I found this same orthodox-heterodox binary to dominate the literature on ‘transition’ from the command to the market economy in Uzbekistan, too. Orthodox researchers averred that state-owned auto company UzAvtoSanoat failed to develop due to inefficiency and corruption, in particular due to the distortions of the government’s industrial policy. Heterodox scholars instead found industrial policy to be the very reason behind the creation of a successful export-oriented car industry, in particular during the commodity supercycle when part of total output was exported mostly to Russia. Neither, however, could explain why Korean Daewoo Motor Company (DMC) and American General Motors (GM) entered into a joint-venture with UzAvtoSanoat, despite the small domestic scale (hence high costs) of automobile production in the country, which is mostly purchased domestically.
Next January the next United Nations Programme of Action for least developed countries (LDCs) will launch in Doha. It will set the framework for the next 10 years of international support for the world’s 46 officially poorest and most structurally disadvantaged countries, home to around a billion people.
LDCs are low-income countries confronting severe structural impediments to sustainable development. Membership of the category is based on three criteria: income per capita, human assets and economic and environmental vulnerability.
Assistance for LDCs currently falls under three categories: trade, aid and a range of ad hoc measures broadly aimed at help with taking part in the international system, such as lower contributions to the UN budget and support for travel to international meetings like the annual UN General Assembly.
Support is largely based on the premise that LDCs are artificially or temporarily excluded from global commerce. Preferential market access, temporary development assistance and help with participating in multilateral processes are intended to tackle this defect, in turn helping the LDCs ‘catch up’.
Dating to 1971, the category is the only one recognised in UN and multilateral legal texts. There is no official ‘developing country’ or ‘middle income’ category with associated support measures. Low income countries are not specifically targeted, and the small and vulnerable states are only recognised as a working group at the World Trade Organisation. They are not acknowledged in the legal texts.
Although donors don’t meet aid pledges and support doesn’t go far enough, official targets are possible because the LDC group is officially recognised in the UN system and has legal bearing. An example of such a target is the commitment by developed countries to deliver 0.15-0.20% of gross national income (GNI) in development assistance to LDCs. The European Union offers duty-free, quota-free market access to LDC exports under its Everything But Arms (EBA) trade scheme for LDCs.
The theory behind support for LDCs is implicitly based on the mainstream economics view that LDCs lag behind because they aren’t exposed enough to correct market prices and conditions. The removal of so-called distortions like overseas tariff and non-tariff barriers, alongside temporary development assistance and help taking part in the global system, is supposed to free up these economies to play a fuller role in the international economy. Economic growth will drive development and reduce poverty.
The evidence shows that for most LDCs this theory never worked. Until the pandemic the economies of some LDCs were performing well. Up to 12 could leave the category in coming years. A few, like Bangladesh, Cambodia and Myanmar, were able to take advantage of lower tariffs for their garment exports. These three countries account for 87% of imports to the EU under EBA.
But half were supposed to meet the criteria by 2020, according to international targets. 12 graduations falls well short. The six that have left since the formation of the category in 1971 have not all done so because of better international market access or special support measures. Commodity exports, tourism or improved health and education are mostly responsible.
The remaining LDCs aren’t catching up. The gap is widening. The pandemic devastated the group. Gross domestic product (GDP) shrank 1.3% on average in 2020, with the economies of 37 contracting during the year and extreme poverty in the group rising by a staggering 84 million. But even before Covid, average real GDP per capita for the group had long diverged from other developing countries and the rest of the world.
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep…” This was how John Maynard Keynes described the globalisation of the Belle Epoque before the First World War. London, and by extension Britain, was at the centre of the world economy: not just a global manufacturing powerhouse, but also the ruler of a vast colonial domain upon which the sun famously never set. The global division of labour was stark: Britain and other Western nations largely produced manufactured goods. But they also exported a whole range of temperate agricultural goods like wheat, beef and barley. Elsewhere in the European colonial empires, products like cotton, cocoa and coffee were exported, often at very low prices and sometimes with forced labour, to sate a growing demand in the global economic core for tropical luxuries.
More than a century has passed since World War I heralded the collapse of this world order. Today, another globalization wave that has shaped the world since the 1980s is ebbing. The question we ask in our ESRC Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialisation? A Century of Global Export Patterns is simple: what is the legacy of the First Globalization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the economic fortunes of countries during the Second Globalization? Or in other words, to what extent have countries’ positions in the international economic order been persistent across the two globalizations with some trapped at the bottom and others floating on top?
To answer this question, we have assembled a large new database of global commodity exports from 1897-1906. We exploit the fact that this period was the high point of colonial trade statistics and use a large variety of primary sources in five languages. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the most ambitious census of world trade for the previous globalization to date. This allows us to investigate the long-term wealth of nations in ways that aren’t possible with GDP data. The latter is sparse and unreliable for large parts of the world before the Second World War.
Assessing industrial policies in Chile remains a rather contentious and divisive topic. Chile has long been held up as an almost‐textbook example of the success of ‘letting the market work’, as there was a broad agreement among mainstream economists that Chile has largely succeeded in promoting strong and stable growth because it has embraced free market policies. At first glance, this may seem believable. Afterall, Chile has one of the fastest growth rates in Latin America since its neoliberal turn in the 1970s. Despite the continuing significance of copper, it has also managed to diversify into other sectors and acquire new competitive advantages between the 1960s and 1990s. The dominant view sustains that the successful emergence of new competitive sectors in Chile’s export basket are the result of four decades of commitment to liberalization and free market policies. However, this post, which is based a recent study, shows that Chile’s export diversification was not the result of free market policies, but of carefully crafted government interventions. The idea of Chile as a ‘free-market miracle’, as first described by Milton Friedman, is therefore one of the most enduring myths associated with recent economic development history.
It is well known that, during the 20th century, the pharmaceutical industry became extremely powerful at the international level, alongside financial, energy, technology, and manufacturing companies (Wells, 1984). The internationalization of the pharmaceutical industry only rose after the internationalization of patent protection in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs Agreement) (Haakonsson, 2009). This industry is highly concentrated around a small number of very large transnational groups (65% of global sales are made by the 20 largest players – the ‘big pharma’) that operate worldwide through subsidiaries in 150 countries, on average. Revenue in the worldwide pharmaceutical market increased at a considerable rate, even during the global slump of 2008, and was estimated at an astounding USD1.143 trillion in 2017 (Statista, 2019). Recently, we published an article on pharmaceutical value chains, which investigates how they are embedded in an international division of labor, from a new-structuralist theoretical perspective. We ask: how global are the pharmaceuticals value chains? Are there centers and peripheries in pharmaceuticals value chains, and if so, which countries are in each pole?
In a recent op-ed, Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times argues that “the conversion by the IMF and World Bank to support the activist state would put Saul of Tarsus to shame.” According to him, we may be witnessing the rise of a new Washington Consensus, which embraces deficit spending (by rich countries), “temporary solidarity surtaxes” on the rich and businesses, green public investment, and other forms of government intervention. This is not only to address the short-term effects of the pandemic, but also to stimulate demand across the world economy. Sandbu finds evidence of this new consensus in the benign view that the IMF has taken on Biden’s “rescue package”, and claims that “the new Washington consensus could prove as politically powerful as the old one.” In another op-ed in October 2020,
Sandbu characterised this new consensus as follows:
“After 1945, the guiding assumption was, first, that the state knew best, then that the private sector was best. We are about to transcend both, in favour of an economic worldview based on finding ways in which government intervention can guide the private sector to perform better. In that sense, economic planning and the activist state are back.”
It is indeed striking that the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the G20, and other multilaterals, have adapted their discourse on the role and place of the state in development. This predates the COVID-19 pandemic. In an open access paper recently published in Antipode, we document the emergence of this new vision of the state in development and outline its key features. Since the early 2010s, these institutions have produced a remarkable wealth of material explicitly concerned with old and new forms of state ownership and intervention. Witness, for instance, this November 2020 EBRD Transition report titled The State Strikes Back, or this chapter dedicated to state-owned enterprises in the IMF 2020 Fiscal Monitor. Our analysis of such policy documents and others suggests that we are witnessing a gradual yet fundamental reorientation of official agendas and discourses about the state. This emerging vision embraces a fuller role of the state in development (than the post-Washington Consensus), including as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital. Our analysis expounds the material context in which this vision is emerging. Two interrelated transformations are particularly important.
In moments of great uncertainty there is refuge to be found in the work of intellectual titans like Samir Amin. After the sad news of his passing in August 2018 in Paris, aged 86, we began thinking about how best to explore the enduring relevance of his analysis and concepts to make sense of contemporary crises.
The pertinence and analytical heft of Amin’s work is particularly important in the contemporary period marked by the interconnected crises related to COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, the climate emergency, and looming debt crises across the periphery. In the years ahead, confronting these multiple and intertwined crises will require the kind of commitment to combining research with political engagement that Amin demonstrated.
Amin’s ability to weave together thorough analysis of the polarising effects of capitalism with concrete political projects for an international radical left makes his work particularly relevant in our quest to understand capitalism, its particularities across the world, and oppositions to it. There is a younger generation of scholars, of which we are a part, that is particularly hungry for Amin’s perspectives, one that came of age in a time where the universities have been thoroughly marketised and moulded by neoliberal processes, and where intellectual production and debates are not necessarily embedded within social struggles.
Developing Economics 