Wednesday 21 March 2012


Hola fellow PovDev students! :-)

As Samantha has already posted, tomorrow we will be focusing on questions of who runs the global economy and the limits to global governance. We will be looking at the global governance of poverty and development. We will look, very briefly, at what we understand by global governance, how it  have developed over time, as well  the main challenges facing global governance in the 21st century. As the main theme of the whole module is ‘poverty and development’, we will look at different frameworks that give rise to particular kind of strategies of alleviating poverty and fostering development on both national and global level.
We will talk about the crisis of the Washington Consensus, as well as the Millennium Development Goals. We encourage you to use the supplementary material we post on this blog, as it is  (hopefully) relevant to the topic this week and to our SSL. In addition to the video posted by Sam, I believe these couple of link s might be quite useful:
This is an article by Joseph Stieglitz on the road China decided to take in defiance of the Washington Consensus. Stieglitz argues against the WC, raising concerns about the fact that market economies cannot be just left to themselves, or ‘on autopilot’. China balanced handling of the economy, with a mixture of market economy and state intervention should be taken as a ‘roadmap’ for responding to constantly changing economies.
I found this article particularly useful.  It shows the difference between China and the U.S. in providing loans and aid. China is defying the WC, it loans money with ‘fewer conditionalities’. Author argues that China has a clear lead over the U.S.  All discussed in the context of Latin America.
WC is far from over, despite all the talk that IMF and WB now include few conditions with their loans, there are examples that both are still operating in ten spirit of the WC. The author is opposed to the WC and argues that we should actively try to get rid of it. This is an article that is useful for anyone who wants to explore the idea that the Washington Consensus is dead.
Some good point about how successful are countercyclical policies, and how much China, who’s as we know from previous articles, is in defiance of WC, has contributed enormously to the worlds goal of reducing poverty.
Finally, a short video on the demise of the Washington Consensus and the apparent rise of the so- called Beijing Consensus.
See you all tomorrow, 
Hanna & Samantha




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