Corporate Bias at World Bank / ICSID
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- Written by Robin Broad
- Category: Articles
This briefing focuses on the main venue for settlement of legal cases brought by corporations against governments: the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). It finds significant ICSID bias in favour of corporations and commercial interests by analysing ICSID overall and by looking at a specific case brought by a global mining corporation against El Salvador.
In late 2014, the Economist magazine wrote:
“If you wanted to convince the public that international trade agreements are a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people, this is what you would do: give foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever a government passes a law to, say, discourage smoking, protect the environment or prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Yet that is precisely what thousands of trade and investment treaties over the past half century have done, through a process known as ‘investor-state dispute settlement’, or ISDS.”
Open Letter to the UN, signed by Chomsky, Pogge, Klein ...
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- Written by Francine Mestrum
- Category: Articles
As the UN and the world's governments ratify the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) today (September 25), we must be clear that they do not represent the best interests of the world's majority -- those that are currently exploited and oppressed within the current economic and political order.
The SDGs claim they can eradicate poverty in all its forms by 2030. But they rely primarily on global economic growth to achieve this tremendous task. If such growth resembles that seen in recent decades, it will take 100 years for poverty to disappear, not the15 years the SDGs promise. And even if this were possible in a shorter timescale, we would need to increase the size of the global economy by a factor of 12, which, in addition to making our planet uninhabitable, will obliterate any gains against poverty.
Read more: Open Letter to the UN, signed by Chomsky, Pogge, Klein...
Why the SDGs won't make the world a fairer place
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- Written by Jason Hickel
- Category: Articles
The much-hyped Sustainable Development Goals to be adopted by the UN summit starting this week in New York will not deliver the new economy that the world so desperately needs. Their creators want to reduce poverty and inequality without touching the wealth and power of the global 1%. They fail to understand a basic fact: Mass poverty is the product of extreme wealth accumulation and over-consumption by a few.
Public SDGs or private 'Global Goals'?
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- Written by Barbara Adams / Global Policy Forum
- Category: Articles
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) negotiated painstakingly over two years by all UN Member States with thousands of public interest organizations providing their commitment and expertise have been copyrighted. And by whom? The UN you would think? But no. They have been re-branded as Global Goals (GGs) and the copyrighted by Project Everyone, a private company incorporated and registered in London.
On its own website (www.globalgoals.org), Project Everyone claims ownership of the 17 icons that it is popularizing, with active help from celebrities and the UN Secretariat itself, representing each of the 17 Goals that the heads of State and Government are endorsing this week as common objectives of humanity from here to the year 2030.
SDGs: Little respite for indebted poor countries
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- Written by Tim Jones /The Guardian
- Category: Articles
For poor countries thwarted in their efforts to reform the global financial system, vague commitments on debt in the 2030 agenda offer scant cause for optimism
In any evaluation of the pros and cons of the millennium development goals, the eighth – on developing a global partnership for development – is inevitably likely to receive the least attention. The idea behind goal eight was that rich countries would change policies to help the MDGs become a reality. The fact that little has happened is one reason why many of the goals will not have been met by the deadline at the end of this year.
World Bank moves the poverty line, once again
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- Written by Shawn Donnan / FT
- Category: Articles
The World Bank is to make the most dramatic change to its global poverty line in 25 years, raising its measure by a half to about $1.90 per day in a move likely to swell the statistical ranks of the world’s poor by tens of millions.
The move from $1.25 would be the biggest revision since the World Bank introduced its $1 a day yardstick of global poverty in 1990.
Fit for whose purpose? Private financing and corporate influence in the UN
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- Written by Barbara Adams and Jens Martens
- Category: Articles
More than a hundred Heads of State and Government will gather in New York this week to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This agenda is intended to make the UN 'fit for purpose', but it is important to ask, 'whose purpose will it be fit for'?
A new study from Global Policy Forum warns that the United Nations is embarking on a new era of selective multilateralism, shaped by intergovernmental policy impasses and a growing reliance on corporate-led solutions to global problems.
Truth and Reconciliation in Sustainable Development
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- Written by Barbara Adams
- Category: Articles
Much has been said about the post-2015, now “2030 Agenda”, about its strengths and weaknesses.
Do the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent an agenda for transformation or for a continuation, at best acceleration, of current practices?
They have the seeds of both.
The SDGs are not the Millennium Development Goals, which were partial goals, shaped mainly on the dynamics of receiving external public assistance, ODA.
These goals are universal and inclusive.
Read more: Truth and Reconciliation in Sustainable Development
Capstone Book on Illicit Financial Flows
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- Written by Global Financial Integrity
- Category: Articles
“A Brief Biography of Illicit Financial Flows,” examines the evolution of the issue from obscurity to global prominence over the past ten years.
Illicit Financial Outflows as a Drag on Human Rights Realization in Developing Countries
In his chapter, Dr. Thomas Pogge notes that today’s huge human rights deficit is almost entirely avoidable. Here, Dr. Pogge argues that “the morally significant issue is not whether such deprivations were even worse twenty-five years ago. Rather, the morally significant issue is whether such deprivations are today partly or wholly avoidable, and if so, at what cost.” Curbing illicit financial outflows must be an aspect of reducing these human rights deficits; massive rights deficit reductions could be achieved if developing countries were able to capture and collect appropriate tax on illicit financial outflows from multinationals and their own wealthiest citizens.
Five Country Studies: India, Mexico, Russia, the Philippines, and Brazil
To be released at the Washington Conference 21-22 September
The changing climate on climate change
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- Written by Gro Harlem Brundlandt
- Category: Articles
In the early 1990s, when I was Prime Minister of Norway, I once found myself debating sustainable development with an opposition leader who insisted that I tell him the government’s single most important priority in that field. Frustrated, I replied that what he was asking was impossible to answer. I concluded our exchange by explaining why: “Because everything is connected to everything.”
Fortunately, such thinking is now more widely held than it was back then, thanks partly to the human development approach, which emphasizes the complexity of nature and recognizes that one-dimensional solutions cannot address multidimensional problems like those we currently face. Indeed, today’s challenges are seldom simply environmental, social, or economic, and their solutions do not lie within the area of competence of a single government ministry. Without broad, multidisciplinary impact analysis, such narrow thinking can lead to new problems.
Humanitarian Aid and Cash Transfers
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- Written by Owen Barder
- Category: Articles
The High Level Panel on Humanitarian Cash Transfers, which I chaired, published our report this week. We concluded that the international system should take deliberate steps to seize two big opportunities to improve humanitarian aid. First, we should take the opportunity to improve humanitarian aid by providing many more unconditional cash transfers. Second, we should use the spread of cash transfers to help bring about much-needed improvements in the humanitarian system.
