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There are increasing efforts with global value chains, and a stronger mandate to work on their governance, so as to address unfair distribution of gains across the chain and the resulting detrimental impacts on employment conditions and inclusive growth .

Shockingly, developed countries even opposed inclusion of the issue of policy space. What is policy space? By this we mean that developing countries must be free from imposed international strictures and rules that go against their development needs.

After this conference, no country from the EU, nor the US or other developed countries, can claim to be in favor of developing countries’ escaping the debt treadmill.

Unfortunately, the rich countries’ club of the OECD has thus far dominated international discussions on taxation, which leave out developing countries and their development concerns. On taxation, UNCTAD 14 sadly became yet another example of how determined rich countries are to ensure the exclusion of developing countries, not just from decision making on tax matters, but also from the possibility of getting independent advice on how to stop the enormous losses of money they suffer from illicit financial flows,

In their letter, civil society highlighted that success in Nairobi must mean “[f]ulfilling the development mandate by strengthening SDT for all developing countries, removing WTO obstacles to food security, and operationalizing benefits for the [LDCs].”

The corporate and rich country government agenda of permanently abandoning the development mandate must be forestalled, along with the imposition of a set of already-rejected or ill-defined non-trade ‘new issues’.”

Experts have detailed how governments won’t be able to implement many aspects of the deal, however, if agreements like the TPP, TTIP [PDF] or TiSA come into force. Much the same could be said about the WTO. Developing country unity and North-South peoples’ solidarity will be essential to a positive outcome at the WTO. Let’s make sure that the United States, the EU, Japan, Australia and others realize that the imperative of development and public interests must come before corporate profit. A good deal should be struck in Nairobi. But if not, then no deal is better than a bad deal.

At the chair's meeting on Wednesday, the US said it cannot accept even the diluted provisions for export credits in the joint proposal, according to agriculture negotiators present at the meeting. The US demands, said an agriculture negotiator, is "tantamount to special and differential treatment only for itself and a broad exemption from multilateral disciplines."

Before discussing its limits, I will summarize Professor Stiglitz’s response to the problem he calls “market failure.” Professor Stiglitz attributes “market failure” to “lack of transparency.” He has several recommendations on how to check market failure. The first is that government needs to bridge the gap between social returns and private returns, both to encourage socially necessary investment as in agriculture and to discourage socially undesirable investment as in real estate speculation. Second, the government may set up specialized development banks. In support, he cites the negative example of America’s private banks and their “dismal performance” alongside the positive example of Brazil’s development bank, a bank twice the size of the World Bank, and its “extraordinary success” in leading that country’s economic transformation. Finally, Professor Stiglitz cautions against liberalizing financial and capital markets as advised by the Washington Consensus.

I am not an economist, but I have been forced to learn its basics to defend myself in the academy and the world. Like you, I live in a world where policy discourse has been dominated – I should say colonized – by economists whose vision is limited to the economy. Professor Stiglitz derides this as “free market fundamentalism” and I agree with him. Like fundamentalist generals who think that the conduct, outcome and consequence of war is determined by what happens on the battlefield, the thought of fundamentalist economists not only revolves around the market but is also limited by it. Just as war is too important an activity to be left to generals, the material welfare of peoples is also too important to be left to economists alone.

The Eurozone was created as a single currency for Europe but without constituting Europe as a democratic polity. The result was that monetary policy was formulated outside the framework of democracy. The states in Europe have done to their own people what the Washington Consensus did to African peoples in the 1980s. Unelected governments rule Europe; the EU ruling phalanx is not accountable to anyone.

Here is my point: The antidote to the market was never the state but democracy. Not the state but a democratic political order has contained the worst fallout from capitalism over the last few centuries. The real custodian of a democratic order was never the state but society. The question we are facing today is not just that of market failure but of an all-round political failure: the financialization of capitalism is leading to the collapse of the democratic order. The problem was best defined by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US: it is the 99% against the 1%.

It would be a shame if this audience is to walk away from Professor Stiglitz’s lecture with a message that the problem is just one of “market failure” and the solution is a robust state that regulates markets and provides development finance. Is the lesson of the Structural Adjustment era simply that we need strong states to defend ourselves from the Washington Consensus? Or does the experience of the SAP era also raise a second question: What happens if developing countries are forced to push open their markets before they have stable, democratic institutions to protect their citizens? Should we be surprised that the result is something worse than crony capitalism, worse than private corruption, whereby those in the state use their positions to privatize social resources and stifle societal opposition?

it is a bit geographically challenging to describe it as the development bank of the ‘South,’ given that Russia is one of the founding members; the largest founding member is entirely north of the Tropic of Cancer except for a tiny sliver (China); and a third was entirely north of the Equator the last time I checked a world map (India).

Many predict or at least hope that the new lending institution will improve the access of middle and low-income countries to financing for infrastructure.

 If the BRICS bank can operate less bureaucratically than the World Bank, that would be a substantial gain in itself.

why is it necessary for countries to borrow to build, for example a new airport? The problem is never ‘money.’  Any government of a country that has its own currency can borrow from the central bank (this would not apply to the 14 members of the West and Central African currency zones). Only one reason comes to mind about borrowing from abroad: that the project may require substantial imports of materials. Thus, the purpose of the borrowing is to obtain US dollars, yen, renminbi, etc.  

is this Gang of Five likely to shift international lending in a more humane and flexible direction as Oxfam hopes?  We should note that the voting proposal for the BRICS bank follows the IMF/World Bank model – money votes with shares, reflecting each government's financial contribution. The largest voting share goes to China, whose record on investments in Africa is nothing short of appalling (see my discussion of Chinese capital in Zambia).

Much better than a project bank for the ‘South’ would be an institution providing long-term loans in foreign currencies. This would have several major advantages over the BRICS bank as envisaged. First, the loans could be made on the basis of a judgment about the ability of the government to repay, not a narrow assessment of a specific project. This rather difficult judgment is the de facto basis of all loan repayment – can the country's export sectors generate the foreign exchange to service the debt? Second, the borrowing country's external debt would increase by the foreign currency component of the project; the rest would be financed domestically. This arrangement would be in line with the famous advice of John Maynard Keynes in 1933, ‘let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national’ (emphasis added). 

The suspicion uppermost in my mind is that the purpose of the BRICS bank, as a project funding bank, is to link the finance offered, to the construction firms and materials suppliers located in the BRICS themselves. Certainly, the Chinese Government is notorious for doing this (see 'China insists on "tied aid" in Africa').

in the last two decades developing countries taken as a whole have been running large trade surpluses with wealthy countries. This implies large trade deficits in rich countries, especially the United States, which in turn has meant a further loss of manufacturing jobs with the resulting negative impact on wage inequality. However, there was nothing inevitable about the policy shifts associated with the bailout from the East Asian financial crisis that led the developing world to become a net exporter of capital.

In this context, it would hardly be surprising if the development of “technology” was causing an upward redistribution of income. The people in a position to profit from stronger IP rules are almost exclusively the highly educated and those at the top end of the income distribution. It is almost definitional that stronger IP rules will result in an upward redistribution of income.

This upward redistribution could be justified if stronger IP rules led to more rapid productivity growth, thereby benefitting the economy as a whole. However, there is very little evidence to support that claim. Michele Boldrin and David Levine have done considerable research on this topic and generally found the opposite.

While tax and transfer policies that reduce poverty and inequality may be desirable, we should also be aware of the ways in which policy has been designed to increase inequality. It is much easier to have an economic system that produces more equality rather than one that needlessly generates inequality, which we then try to address with redistributive policies.

The former staff of UNCTAD were so concerned about the earlier drafts that they alerted the public through a letter, pointing out the spuriousness of the OECD countries’ objections, and highlighting the importance of UNCTAD’s role: This is neither a cost-saving measure nor an attempt to “eliminate duplication” as some would claim. ... [W]e all fervently believe in the value of maintaining an independent research capability that serves to focus inter-governmental debates on how the workings of the global economy affect developing countries.

Lobbying was also a key strategy. Jubilee USA and other allies successfully lobbied the U.S. to improve language on debt sustainability, and several European groups were able to mitigate the EU’s position through appealing to the Norwegian and Finnish governments.

On the third day of negotiations “upstairs” where the tough issues were being handled, Ambassador Wasescha made a surprising announcement. He said the JUSCANZ and the EU were prepared to accept the main controversial Paragraphs 16 and 17, if the G77 would give up the paragraphs supporting Cuba and Palestine. Delegates were outraged. It is common knowledge that countries utilize leverage in negotiations, and horse-trading is the norm. But rarely in diplomatic group negotiations is such tit-for-tat so explicitly expressed.

Next, the Palestinian negotiator took the floor. “I would like to inform you that a few minutes ago, the Israeli representative and I came to agreement on the text on Palestine. After futile meetings with the Europeans and the JUSCANZ in Geneva for months, we have come to agreement on language in fifteen minutes. So you cannot use this issue to obtain something else you want,” he said. Shortly after, the Cuban negotiator made a similar announcement that an agreement had been reached between his delegation and the United States.

The epic tug-of-war between the internationalism of communist versus capitalist was not the only type of internationalism to emerge from the 20th century. A non-Western Euro-centric reflection recognizes the history of the movement for Pan-Africanism in the struggle for a united African continent under a socialist government. The original Organization of African Unity (OAU) – now the African Union (AU) – was a direct attempt toward that.