Since the imposition of free market policies in the 1980s, globalization has come to represent an ideological battle between those who favor economic growth and deregulation through the growing power of multinational corporations, versus those who prefer a more sustainable and democratic approach to international development, socio-economic justice, and the securing of basic human rights and needs.
The EU will declare war today on Liechtenstein, Monaco, Andorra and Switzerland. Weary of losing billions of tax euros, Ecofin is meeting in Brussels to agree a strategy aimed at bringing the continent's tax havens under control, by Sean O'Grady.
Markets reinvented the world, and nobody intended – or even envisaged – the outcome. Now the role of the left in an era of declining state power is to ensure that the structures of governance are directed towards protecting all equally, writes Nigel Harris.
Davos is a small, and for much of the year, an ordinary Swiss ski resort. But, for about a week every year, limousines and helicopters converge in Davos as the world’s rich and mighty congregate to attend the World Economic Forum, by Bhaskar Dutta.
The ideology of neoliberal globalization was not in fact a new idea in the history of the modern world-system, although it claimed to be one. It was rather the very old idea that the governments of the world should get out of the way of large, efficient enterprises in their efforts to prevail in the world market.
Is there an alternative to plundering the earth? Is there an alternative to making war? Is there an alternative to destroying the planet?
By Prof. Claudia von Werlhof.
An average of nearly two out of three people in 34 countries around the world believe that the benefits and burdens resulting from changes in their nation's economy over the last few years are not being distributed fairly, according to a new multinational survey released Thursday by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). That view was held by a majority in 27 countries and by well over two-thirds of respondents in Latin America, continental Europe, non-oil-producing nations of the Middle East, and East Asia.
Wild stock market gyrations and a global financial meltdown open 2008. Around the world, old and new critics of neo-liberalism smirk and repeat "I told you so." Neo-liberal dogma -- that private enterprise is good and efficient whereas state economic interventions are bad and wasteful -- suffers deepening disrepute. The private, deregulated capitalism of recent decades produced imprudent credit orgies that generated unsustainable bubbles bursting across scary headlines.
