Fiscal Transfers to Capitalists

IT is common for governments these days to provide fiscal transfers to capitalists, whether through reduced corporate tax rates, or by providing direct cash subsidies, to encourage greater investment by them and thereby stimulate the economy. During Donald Trump’s first presidency there had been a cut in corporate tax rate with this objective in mind. In India the Modi government, as is well-known, has given massive tax concessions with the same objective.

The Crisis of Liberalism

TRUMP’s victory in the US Presidential election conforms to a pattern presently observable across the world, namely a collapse of the liberal centre and a growth in support either for the Left, or for the extreme Right, the neo-fascists, in situations in which the Left is absent or weak.

The Kazan Summit of BRICS

THE Kazan summit of the BRICS countries was a historic one for several reasons: first, it created a new category called “partner nations” as a step towards full membership, and accepted 13 such new “partner” countries, among whom were Cuba and Bolivia. Second, it came out against unilateral economic sanctions that the US-led imperialist powers have been imposing on countries that dare to assert their independence from imperialist hegemony. Third, it suggested a programme of reform for the International Monetary and Financial System.

Economics and Ideology

WHAT is referred to as “mainstream economics” is a deeply ideological subject, whose objective is not to uncover the truth but to camouflage it. Karl Marx had been profoundly aware of the ideological character that economics can have, and had distinguished between classical political economy and vulgar economy.

The Dialectics of Wealth and Poverty

THIS year’s Nobel Prize in economics (the Riksbank Prize to be more precise) has been awarded to three US-based economists for their research into what promotes or hinders the growth of wealth among nations; and they assign a crucial role to institutions, arguing that western institutions like electoral democracy are conducive to growth.

How Not to Measure Poverty

SEVERAL international organisations are now engaged in the business of measuring what they call “poverty”. The World Bank has been in it for some time, but now we have a new measure of “Multidimensional Poverty” brought out by the UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Neither of these measures however actually measures poverty; they typically end up “prettifying” neo-liberal capitalism.

Imperialism’s Striving for Expansion

THE “inevitable striving of finance capital”, Lenin had written in Imperialism, (is) “to enlarge its spheres of influence and even its actual territory”. He was writing of course in a world marked by inter-imperialist rivalry, where this striving took the form of a competitive struggle between rival finance capitals that speedily completed the partitioning of the world, leaving no “empty spaces”; only a repartitioning of the world was thenceforth possible, through wars among rival financial oligarchies.

The Stagnation of the World Economy

THE fact that the world economy has slowed down since the financial crisis of 2008 is beyond dispute. In fact even conservative American economists have started using the term “secular stagnation” to describe the current situation (though they have their own peculiar definition for it). The purpose of the present note is to give some growth-rate figures to establish this particular point.Calculations of GDP, which are notoriously unreliable for particular countries, are even more so for the world as a whole.

West Africa’s Resistance against Imperialism

WEST Africa, which had been largely under French colonial rule, never saw decolonisation of the sort that India did. For a start, the erstwhile French colonies’ currency continued to be linked to the French franc at a fixed exchange rate, which meant that they could not pursue any fiscal and monetary policy of their choice (for that would have threatened the fixed exchange rate).

The Bizarre State of Western Democracy

DURING the entire post-war period when it has been in existence in the metropolitan countries, democracy has never been in as bizarre a state as it is today. Democracy is supposed to mean the pursuit of policies that are in conformity with the wishes of the electorate.

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Peoples Democracy

ECONOMIC NOTES