STWR - Share The World's Resources

8th November 07 - Ashley Seagar, The Guardian (UK)

A cross party group of MPs has urged the government to introduce a small tax on foreign exchange dealings as a way of raising money to combat poverty worldwide.

The All Party Parliamentary Group for debt, aid and trade, supported by campaign group Stamp Out Poverty, say that a "sterling stamp duty" levied at just 0.005% of the value of transactions carried out by UK-based foreign exchange dealings could raise $2.4bn a year that could be ring-fenced for international development - enough to fund basic healthcare in Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania for an entire year.

23rd October 07 - UN News Centre

A new United Nations study reveals that migrants working in industrialized countries sent home more than $300 billion to their families in 2006 – surpassing the $104 billion provided by donor nations in foreign aid to developing countries.

“This figure, which is a conservative estimate, shows that the seemingly small sums sent home by migrant workers when added together dwarf official development assistance,” said Kevin Cleaver, Assistant President of the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which co-authored the study with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

According to Sending money home: Worldwide remittances to developing countries, Asia received the largest share of the remittances – more than $114 billion – followed by Latin America and the Caribbean with $68 billion, Eastern Europe with $51 billion, Africa with $39 billion and the Near East with $29 billion.

India received the most of any single nation with $24.5 billion, followed by Mexico ($24.2 billion), China ($21 billion), the Philippines ($14.6 billion) and Russia ($13.7 billion).

The study also found that the remittances sent home regularly by some 150 million migrants exceeded foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries, which last year totalled around $167 billion.

IFAD underscored that more than one third of these remittances flow to families in rural areas, and is mostly used for basic necessities such as food, clothing and medicines. While 10 to 20 per cent is saved, too often these savings are hidden in homes rather than put to work in financial institutions, constituting a “major missed opportunity for local development.”

The study based its figures are based on official data from governments, banks and money operators, as well as estimates of informal flows, such as money carried home. It was released yesterday ahead of the International Forum on Remittances 2007, co-hosted by IFAD and IDB in Washington.

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9th October 07 - George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK)

Economic growth is a political sedative, snuffing out protest as it drives inequality. It is time we gave it up.

If you are of a sensitive disposition, I advise you to turn the page now. I am about to break the last of the universal taboos. I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises. I recognise that recession causes hardship. Like everyone I am aware that it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes. I do not dismiss these impacts or the harm they inflict, though I would argue that they are the avoidable results of an economy designed to maximise growth rather than welfare.

2nd October 07 - Stephen King, The Independent (UK)

Earlier in the year, economic life seemed so straightforward. Growth around the world was buoyant. Inflationary pressures were building. Excess liquidity – however defined – was a major worry. The vast majority of central banks were planning on raising interest rates.

Over the past few weeks, though, this consensus has completely broken down. Investors don't know what to think.

27th September 07 - Rodrigue Tremblay, Global Research

26th September 07 - Richard C. Cook, Global Research

C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), a Scottish-born engineer, who worked for a number of American and British companies in the early years of the twentieth century, was the founder of the modern monetary reform movement. My own interest in monetary reform dates from discovering Douglas’s ideas through a reprint of A.R. Orage’s articles about them in Orage’s publication The New Age dating from the 1920s.

25th September 07 - Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect

The financial meltdown is the logical consequence of deregulation. Will we reverse field in time to prevent another 1929?

The federal reserve is still struggling to contain what is already the most severe credit contraction since the Great Depression. Yet in all of the press coverage, commentators have scarcely acknowledged that this old-fashioned panic is a child of deregulation.