The economist Alice Amsden’s work unmasked the dirty secret underlying capitalist development: it relied on states breaking all the rules of the free market. But her work also showed that industrialization required corporate discipline, not welfare.

For American defenders of economic liberalism and free markets, China’s rise has been deeply disorientating. Unmoved by concerns about the market distorting effects of picking winners, the Communist Party of China has engaged in a focused campaign of industrial policy, using the state to discipline firms that have gone on to become globally competitive.

For the economist Alice Amsden, who came to prominence in the late 1980s for her writing on global development and died in 2012, the success of China would not have come as a surprise. Amsden began her career as powerful development institutions such as the World Bank were touting deregulation and privatization as solutions to global poverty. But the experience of the postwar years, in which South Korea — a recurring object of study for Amsden — used industrial policy to drag itself into middle income status, was a refutation of the orthodoxies rehearsed at Davos and in the International Monetary Fund.

The embrace of state subsidies to firms, tariffs, and large-scale infrastructure spending under Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s presidencies is partly a concession to the kind of developmentalist thinking advocated by Amsden. However, Amsden, a fellow traveler, if not devotee, to Marxism offered a more ambivalent assessment of the records of late industrializing nations like South Korea and China than defenders of Biden/Trumponomics are perhaps willing to countenance. For her, the repression of labor was as important to the success of these nations as large-scale economic coordination.

Marxism Without Dogmas

Amsden was born in New York City and studied economics at Cornell University as an undergraduate before completing a PhD in the discipline at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1971. From the LSE, she had a distinguished career at some of her discipline’s most august institutions: a stint at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) followed by positions at UCLA, Columbia, Harvard, the New School, and MIT, her last post before her early death in 2012, aged just sixty-nine.

Power — an almost undiscussed phenomena within economics — was central to her analysis of the world. “I’m usually driven by injustice or hypocrisy rather than by a two-sector model,” she said in 2008,  to the dominant approach of viewing society’s key interests groups as households and businesses. Born in 1943, the anti-imperialism of the postwar left played a greater role in shaping her outlook than her discipline’s dogmas. Like many members of her generation, she protested the United States’ war on Vietnam throughout the 1960s. She had little patience for the idea that the West had brought modernity to the Rest: hostility toward the British Empire animated much of her historical writing and she never tired of castigating the United States for attempting to establish a world economy favorable to its firms.The British Empire was, she quipped, a domain in which the ‘sun never sets . . . and wages never rise.’

Duncan Foley, emeritus professor of economics at the New School and a former colleague of Amsden in the late 1970s and 1980s, described her as working within the tradition of “non-Stalinist Marxism” and the “non-dogmatic political left.” As Foley recalls, theory was for Amsden “a guide, or a compass, to look at and explain the world” rather than a scripture to be slavishly followed.

The subject of her PhD was the British colonial state’s role in structuring the Kenyan labor market. The colonial administration, her thesis showed, used coercive means to force African farmers to work for British farms rather than themselves. It seized land and prohibited Africans from cultivating cash crops that might compete with British farmers while imposing taxes on these constrained producers.

These ideas fed into her 2007 monograph, Escape from Empire: The Developing World’s Journey through Heaven and Hell. The British Empire was, she quipped, a domain in which the “sun never sets . . . and wages never rise.”

The Janus-Faced Character of Development

Central to her analysis of capitalist development was a set of Marxist assumptions. Chief among these was the concept of surplus value, which explains how capital exploits labor. Surplus value denotes the difference between the value of workers’ wages and the value of what they produce. Firms, she observed, aim to increase their appropriation of surplus value by increasing the rate of labor exploitation.Amsden noted that what distinguished more from less successful cases of late industrialization was not the embrace of the market — as argued for by liberal political economy — but economic planning organized through an industrial policy.

If they succeed in doing so faster than other competing firms, they can use their greater profits to invest in productivity-enhancing technologies to further their competitiveness. Over time such dynamics shape the structure of a nation’s market. Firms that prove themselves capable of extracting more value from labor increasingly come to dominate in the sectors of the economy in which they are competing.

Finding a way to increase the productivity of domestic firms was therefore crucial to economic development. Amsden showed how one of the keys to late industrialization is for states to establish a virtuous circle between capital and labor in which high rates of surplus value are extracted from workers and re-invested in modern technologies. In a 1981 , “An international comparison of the rate of surplus value in manufacturing industry,” she produced an analysis of the rate of surplus value in different countries, which read like an updated version of Karl Marx’s Capital:

The magnitude of the rate of surplus value depends on the length of the working day
 the level of productivity, and the struggle over wages. The more developed the productive forces, the less time needed to produce the wage goods required for the reproduction of the working class and the higher surplus value.

The conclusion that she drew from this was that capitalist development was a Janus-faced phenomenon because it relied on the suppression of labor.

The extraordinarily high rates of surplus value in countries which are now described as semi-industrialized may be hypothesized to stem from a combination of advanced technology and wage levels that are still abysmal.

In her 1990  article “Third World Industrialization: ‘Global Fordism’ or a New Model?” Amsden used these insights to explain South Korea’s rapid development.

High profits in Korea’s mass-production industries have been derived not merely from investments in machinery and modern work methods (what Marx calls “relative surplus-value extraction”. . .) but also from the world’s longest working week (what Marx calls “absolute surplus-value extraction”) . . .

Here, too, an analytic clarity, eased by a Marxist realism about the fact of exploitation, led Amsden to adopt a less sanguine view of progress than many in her profession. Cheap labor was, she argued,

the anchor of late industrialization . . . . The discipline of labor by the state lies at the heart of all late industrialization . . . . Labor repression is the basis of late industrialization everywhere . . . .

The identification of how cheap labor and labor repression underpins late industrialization is a vital insight. It should, perhaps, be remembered as “Amsden’s law of late industrialization.” While early in her academic career she deployed Marxist thinking to understand capitalist development, Amsden rose to prominence as a theorist of the statist political economy, which had emerged in Asia.

The Price is Wrong

In Asia’s Next Giant, Amsden noted that what distinguished more from less successful cases of late industrialization was not the embrace of the market — as argued for by liberal political economy — but economic planning organized through an industrial policy. Effective industrial policy was determined by states’ ability to impose discipline on business. From the 1960s onward, the South Korean state used five-year plans to transform a largely agrarian economy into one dominated by heavy industrial and then advanced technology.

This was no accident produced by the invisible hand of the market. South Korea’s elites deliberately distorted market prices to facilitate late industrialization. Amsden set herself to understand how these elites, by “picking winners” and presiding over what she called “reciprocal control mechanisms,” produced economic growth by flouting all of the rules advocated by free marketeers.The South Korean state owned and controlled all commercial banks, effectively determining which firms received finance and under what conditions.

The significance of this success is hard to overstate. In 1960, South Korea had a similar per capita income to Honduras while by the 1990s observers labeled it one of the increasingly wealthy and powerful “Tiger” economies of East Asia. Classic mechanisms of infant industry protection, crucial to the development of the United States in the nineteenth century, including tariffs to protect domestic firms from more advanced competition and export subsidies to enhance firms’ competitiveness in international markets, were crucial. While many postcolonial states protected their nascent industries following their political independence, South Korea did so distinctly:

In other countries, in Turkey and India for example, subsidies have been dispensed primarily as giveaways. In Korea the “wrong” prices have been right because government discipline over business has enabled subsidies and protection to be less than elsewhere and more effective.

The state worked closely with, and imposed its objectives upon, the Chaebol â€” diversified business groups that dominated key economic sectors. Famous Chaebols include Hyundai Heavy Industries group, comprising thirty-six affiliates engaged in shipbuilding, heavy industries, robotics and engineering, and the Samsung group, comprising around sixty affiliates engaged in electronics, semiconductors, and IT.

The South Korean state’s use of reciprocal control mechanisms compelled protected firms to meet performance targets — such as increased productivity, higher export volumes, and greater international competitiveness — on pain of losing state support. Firms that received subsidies had to become internationally competitive:

The sternest discipline imposed by the Korean government on virtually all large size firms, no matter how politically well connected related to export targets. There was constant pressure from government bureaucrats on corporate leaders to sell more abroad.

If firms did not export after a specified period of state largesse, their funds were cut off, and they were even expropriated by the state. For example, few people today have heard of Taihan group, an early South Korean electronics producer. When it failed to expand, the government transferred its ownership to the now world-famous Daewoo Electronics.

The state’s manipulation of market prices facilitated, rather than dampened, capital accumulation:

Insofar as the state in late industrialization has intervened to establish multiple prices in the same market, the state cannot be said to have gotten relative prices “right” as dictated by supply and demand. In fact, the state in late industrialization has set relative prices deliberately “wrong” in order to create profitable investment opportunities.

South Korea’s policymakers used yearly negotiated price controls to curb monopoly power. The state set low prices for industrial inputs such as electricity, steel, chemicals, gas, and synthetic fibers to benefitted protected firms. Paying less for key inputs enabled the latter to plow more of their revenues into research and development.

The South Korean state owned and controlled all commercial banks, effectively determining which firms received finance and under what conditions. It used capital controls to prevent capital flight. It curbed the latter by laws, including one in the 1960s, which specified that any unpermitted export of over $1 million would be punished by a minimum of ten years in jail, or even the death sentence.

Development as Exploitation

As part of the neoliberal agenda from the 1980s onward, many developing country states turned away from their prior infant industry protection strategies and embraced free market ideology.  In Escape from Empire, Amsden castigated the United States, World Bank, and later the World Trade Organization (WTO), for promoting free market policies that constrained developing countries’ ability to deploy industrial policy.

In reality, however, as Amsden herself observed, developing states with sufficient political savvy could still work within WTO rules to channel subsidies to favored firms by deploying industrial policies allowed by the WTO to rich countries. State support for new businesses through investments in science and technological innovation, to facilitate regional equality and environmental improvement are  rules. The star student within the cohort of developing nations was China which operated within WTO rules to deploy industrial policy in new ways.

The Chinese state’s ability to channel finance into selected industries and to pick winners echoes the strategies pursued by the South Korean state. Industries such as mining and energy production are controlled by the state and provide cheap inputs to China’s increasingly globally competitive firms. The state specifies sectors in which FDI is prohibited, restricted, or encouraged while encouraging joint ventures to facilitate technology transfer.

An example of a global “winner” is digital communications giant, Huawei. Established in 1987, by 2012 it had overtaken Ericsson to become the world’s biggest telecommunications equipment manufacturer. Its rise, comparable to that of the South Korean Chaebols between the 1960s and 1980s, has been supported by state-backed companies, such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which produces cutting-edge computer chips.The lesson to be drawn from Amsden’s work is that the state can use its coercive powers to shape the economic behavior of firms.

The lynchpin of China’s late industrialization, however, are the low wages and labor repression that have established the largest workforce in world history. Average working hours have increased significantly since the 1970s. For , at  and other high-tech companies a seventy-two-hour workweek — twelve hours a day, six days a week — is the norm. As China’s firms have pursued technological advances, their ability to squeeze more out of workers for the same labor input has increased.

The Chinese state has also commodified many goods and services — abolishing secure lifetime employment, marketizing child-care provision, and eliminating most price controls on food. These measures increase pressure on workers to work longer hours for meager pay.

Amsden’s early observations about increasing the rate of surplus value — through combining long working days with advanced technologies — is particularly relevant to contemporary China. The Chinese working class, relative to the value they produce, is cheap, highly disciplined, and increasingly highly skilled, and the state has used it to attract foreign investment, induce technological transfer, and generate rapid economic growth.

Both China and South Korea revealed a tension running through Amsden’s work. On the one hand, her account of the real mechanisms underlying development served as a devastating critique of free market ideology. But this development had as its dark underside the exploitation of labor, which she showed was the basis of late industrialization everywhere.

But there are reasons to think that this tension may be resolvable. The lesson to be drawn from Amsden’s work is that the state can use its coercive powers to shape the economic behavior of firms. This could work to serve pro-labor ends, just as well as it can ensure increases in productivity. However, as with all political action, what is required is a coalition of forces capable of shaping the actions of elites. With a Republican right more committed to corporate welfare than industrial policy, such a prospect seems hard to imagine. But the great strength of Amsden’s work is to show that it could, perhaps, be possible.

Benjamin SelwynÌęis a professor of international relations and international development at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His publications include The Struggle for Development (Polity Press: 2017).

Defenders of capitalism argue that cooperation is undermined by individuals’ tendency to take more from society than they contribute. The economist Elinor Ostrom refuted this idea, but without identifying capitalism as the real cause of exploitation.

Socialist arguments that cooperation and collective action represent the basis of a better society are often dismissed by supporters of capitalism. “Human nature,” so the argument goes, is inherently self-seeking.

The so-called “free-rider problem” purports to prove that large-scale cooperation is unsustainable because individuals seek to benefit from the collective action of others while minimizing their own contribution. This tendency is, the argument goes, a barrier to collective solutions to social problems.

Rather than cooperate, individuals should allow market forces to dictate how they decide to allocate their time and resources. Such arguments are applied by supporters of capitalism to explain why rational collective resource management and attempts to tackle climate breakdown are unlikely to succeed without the aid of market forces.

Since capitalism emerged as the world’s dominant economic system, its defenders have argued that private property rights and the pricing of natural resources are the only way to collectively manage our social goods.

The economist Elinor Ostrom provided a sharp critique of such notions from within the framework of mainstream economics. She demonstrated that cooperative management of natural resources can preserve rather than degrade them, and that trust between strangers can be established, expanded, and become the basis of collaborative ways of managing what she described as “common-pool resources.”

Within the field of sustainable development studies, her work became highly influential and helped to bring the notion of “the commons” to a broader audience. However, outside of academia, she remains largely unknown — a glaring oversight in a world in which education, water, and even land are increasingly run and managed for and by private companies.

Against Free-Rider Problem Approaches

Born in 1933 in Los Angeles, Ostrom grew up during the Depression against the backdrop of a socially conservative America and worked as an economist until her death in 2012, at the age of seventy-eight. At school, she was denied the opportunity to study mathematics because she was a woman, a slight that had a long-lasting impact on her career.Ostrom demonstrated that cooperative management of natural resources can preserve rather than degrade them.

Later, when she applied for doctoral study at the University of California Los Angeles, she was denied entry to the economics program because of her lack of earlier training in mathematics. She decided instead to study for a PhD in political science, a move that made her alert to the depoliticizing tendencies of the discipline she would come to shape. Her PhD, completed in 1965, focused on the management of shared groundwater in Southern California.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone whose work had an egalitarian bent, Ostrom associated with and participated in conservative circles. Between 1982 and 1984, she was president of the Public Choice Society. The tradition of public choice is rooted in the assumption that policymakers are self-seeking, that the capitalist market is a public good, and that privatization is desirable.

While she did not entirely accept the dominant ideology of neoliberal economics, she shared many of its assumptions. This put limits on her work that economists of the Left seeking to engage with her thinking would have to overcome.

One of the prime targets of Ostrom’s work was the aforementioned “free rider problem,” which purported to show that if a person cannot be excluded from the benefits provided by the collective action of others, then that person is motivated not to participate but to “free-ride” on gains of the others.

Perhaps the most pernicious variant of the free-rider problem was what the ecologist Garrett Hardin called the “tragedy of the commons.” In 1968, Hardin used the example of common grazing land to argue that, while it is in everyone’s interest to cooperate, individuals follow their self-interest and exploit shared resources until they are exhausted. Avoiding this tragedy required extinguishing the commons by state control or privatization.

Hardin’s thesis became popular in conservative circles as part of a backlash against a  that had emerged in the early 1960s. For example, the marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring illuminated the link between corporate capital’s profit-seeking and increasingly widespread environmental destruction caused by pesticides. She proposed greater regulation of pesticide use and greater government accountability and public awareness to counter corporations’ ability to damage the environment.

Hardin’s thesis, by contrast, blamed individual’s self-interest, rather than corporate capital, for environmental degradation.

Ostrom expanded her writing about common-pool resources (CPRs) in the 1980s, when movements for environmental protection and justice were in the news. But she did not see her work as contributing to such struggles.

From the late 1960s onward, the Brazilian military dictatorship began opening the Amazon forest to “development” — a euphemism for land speculation, deforestation, logging, and the expansion of cattle ranching. In opposition to these forces, social movements, often collaborating with radical elements of the Catholic church, fought for their rights to live in and manage the natural resources of the Amazon.

By the 1980s, these struggles — especially following the murder of the Brazilian trade union leader Chico Mendes — were becoming increasingly visible and popular among populations in the Global North.

Following Brazil’s transition to democracy in the 1980s, these social movements succeeded in forcing the Brazilian state to establish new commons for rubber tappers and fisherfolk who hunted along the rivers and estuaries of the Amazon.

Such struggles were not part of Ostrom’s notion of collective action. She instead provided an image of harmonious collective action that could preserve natural resources.

Ostrom’s Notion of Common-Pool Resources

Ostrom took issue with the assumptions the free-rider problem made about the individual. “Users [of resources] are pictured as trapped in a situation they cannot change. Thus, it is argued that solutions must be imposed on users by external authorities,” she wrote in a 1999 .

Through numerous empirical studies, she showed how individuals cooperate to organize resource use in ways that are environmentally sustainable. She  to people the ability to communicate and to establish “institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time.”

Her interlinked notions of CPRs and collective governance explain how collective action by individuals can successfully regulate resource use.

CPRs are human-constructed and natural resources where a) it is difficult to exclude potential beneficiaries, and b) exploitation of the resource by one user reduces its availability for others. CPRs include terrestrial and marine ecosystems — ranging from forests to groundwater basins to irrigation systems to fishing stocks.

CPRs can be governed by a range of institutional arrangements that shape individuals’ behavior and subsequent economic and environmental outcomes. For example, in the early 1970s in southwest Turkey, the Alanya fishing community was riven with conflict and suffering from unpredictable catches and rising costs due to unregulated fishing. In response, the community found its own collective solution to this problem.Ostrom’s writing remains valuable, both as a critique of the pathologies of the present and as evidence of the shortcoming of market-orientated solutions to these problems.

They worked together to establish a cooperative that registered all eligible fishers and identified usable fishing locations. Boats could fish in these locations between September and May (to enable reproduction of fish stocks during the summer). Every September, each registered boat was allocated to a fishing location. They spent one day in each location before moving to the next one.

In this way, each boat had equal access and opportunity to harvest the sea, fish stock replenishment was ensured, prior conflicts were practically eliminated, and predictability (and hence incomes) maximized.

Alanya, Ostrom argued in her book Governing the Commons, “provides an example of a self-governed common-property arrangement in which the rules have been devised and modified by the participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by them.”

Limits to Ostrom’s Thought

Ostrom married her radical ideas about cooperation to some rather conventional ones about economics. She wrote that the “competitive market — the epitome of private institutions — is itself a public good.” What this ignored was the fact that unequal power within the market effected the ability of agents within it to make rational decisions about the collective management of social goods.

While she drew on anthropological and sociological studies for her work, she filtered these insights through the narrow conceptual lens of new institutional economics (NIE), an outlook that recognized the role of the state and other social institutions in shaping market behavior while holding onto a rational-choice view of individual actions within the market.

Consequently, questions of class and power remained absent from her analysis. This omission did serious harm. Thanks to it, she missed the key driver of the degradation of the commons and environmental destruction: unequal class power.

But while Ostrom may have held onto assumptions that undermined the radical insights of her theory, later interpreters of her work did not.

For example, Craig Johnson, a political scientist, has written about how economic inequalities affect how inshore fisheries in Thailand are :

Even for the relatively well-endowed owner-operators, however, the benefits that accrued from common property were barely keeping pace with the escalating costs of coastal fishing and variable returns. Indeed, the only households who appeared to be “getting ahead” in the industry were those with the capital, influence and contacts to command new or vital market niches, such as contract processing and direct marketing.

Ostrom, by treating capitalist markets as natural, missed the pivotal moment in the establishment of these markets: the destruction of the commons by the enclosures. This was an insight that Karl Marx, writing more than a century earlier, had gleaned in Capital.

In the chapter entitled “Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land,” Marx  how between the fifteenth and nineteenth century, “the systematic theft of communal property was of great assistance in swelling large farms and in ‘setting free’ the agricultural population as a proletariat for the needs of industry.”

But Ostrom, despite moving far from the dogmas of her discipline, was unable to see the harm that imbalances of power have on society. This proved fatal for her understanding of global environmental destruction. In an article written for the , she wrote how

while many of the effects of climate change are global, the causes of climate change are the actions undertaken by individuals, families, firms, and actors at a much smaller scale.

Such a formulation would be music to the ears of the hundred firms responsible for over 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, who have  to obscure their environmental impacts. This tendency to equate individuals, families, and firms stemmed from Ostrom’s NIE approach. But it did not condemn her thinking to irrelevance.

Her ideas continue to be useful as a counter to justifications of privatization and for local-level management of resources. Yet her notion of cooperation between individuals was founded upon the assumption that the definition of success was the sustainable use of local resources through capitalist markets.

Decades of environmental destruction combined with rising inequality have proved the incompatibility of free markets, democracy, and the common good. Against the backdrop of today’s social and environmental crisis, Ostrom’s writing remains valuable, both as a critique of the pathologies of the present and as evidence of the shortcomings of market-oriented solutions to these problems.

Benjamin SelwynÌęis a professor of international relations and international development at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His publications include The Struggle for Development (Polity Press: 2017).

By GĂŒney IĆŸÄ±kara and

The recent paper by GastĂłn Nievas and Thomas Piketty, has gained substantial praise as well as criticism in a short period of time. Their empirical endeavor is impressive: the authors compiled and published a large dataset of balance of payments, including traded goods, services, direct transfers, and income from foreign labor and capital assets. This is a gruelling task in itself, and the dataset will certainly provide the foundations for many fruitful studies. For many academic economists, Nievas and Piketty’s own interpretation of the data constitutes one such great contribution for it puts forward, as the title of their paper suggests, that modern inequalities across regions and countries have their roots in colonial extraction and unequal exchange characterizing international trade until today. 

We on the other hand argue that the paper falls behind the state of perception of international inequalities in the Marxist tradition, dependency and structural economics literature. It (1) grasps global inequality as the outcome of a collection of distortions of the capitalist market mechanism rather than as an intrinsic feature of the latter; (2) consequently, proposes structural reforms to alter the power asymmetries in international trade, without an appropriate model of those power relations and why they exist in the first place; (3) lacks an adequate theory of production, value and price to understand the exchange relations at stake; and (4) artificially separates the term unequal exchange from the existing literature on trade inequalities, value transfers, and drain of wealth.  

This is not the alternative economics needs

Our first insight is trivial: Nievas and Piketty’s political economics is not radical. They describe fundamental and persistent inequalities at the heart of global capitalism but provide no fundamental criticism of global capitalism as an exploitative system endogenously generating various forms of inequality. Instead, they run counterfactual simulations that cancel out colonial extraction (for example, tributary payments), price differentials between raw materials and manufactured goods, and balance them with hypothetical decreases in the consumption of high income segments. These simulations suggest that persistent global inequalities result from a (vast and heterogenous) collection of one-off market distortions. 

Consequently, they propose fundamental, but not systemic, regulatory changes that should enable market-driven global convergence. The authors argue that “changes in bargaining power and terms of exchange can have enormous consequences on the relative wealth of nations and on their development opportunities,” and discuss the possibilities of designing a mutually beneficial trade and monetary system through structural reforms of the international monetary and exchange system, a language that is familiar from economic textbooks and IMF publications. It amounts to the defence of hopelessly failing mainstream theories of international macroeconomics by means of identifying isolated imperfections.

No theory of political and economic power relations

That is a toothless conceptualization of power and conflict in global capitalism, where international inequalities are expressed in and through the market mechanism and competition, not as deviations from it. Political and economic power are inseparable, especially at the international level, a pattern the authors themselves describe with the help of the relationship of colonial extraction and capital accumulation.  As capital accumulation transgressed national borders and gained an international character, it built on and transformed existing inequalities, and created new ones as an inherently uneven process. By implication, the roots and interplay of political and economic power need theorization. While the authors state that “global economic relations appear to be characterized by persistent inequalities and power relations rather than self-correcting market mechanisms” (p.7), their conclusions delude that the market mechanism would produce internationally equitable outcomes, if only non-economic power imbalances were held in check.

The study of what the authors call “unequal exchange” thereby becomes a descriptive, empiricist exercise. It does not provide (any) systematic analysis of the dynamics which favor the imperialist center, let alone understand them as an integral part of global capitalism. It comes as no surprise that they fully ignore the theoretical and empirical investigations undertaken in the past hundred years, associated with Marxist studies of imperialism, unequal exchange, and the vast dependency literature, which their paper has significant overlaps with.

A “bastardized” theory of unequal exchange and imperialism

It is even more striking what Nievas and Piketty choose to ignore. They document how trade deficits in raw materials with simultaneous trade surplus in manufactured goods enabled the European imperialist powers of the 19th century to dominate global capital accumulation while sustaining a trade deficit. The crude distinction between raw materials and manufactured goods is a reasonable trade-off when harmonizing large datasets with considerable gaps, and when discussing the data collection. But the ensuing theoretical interpretation lags significantly behind the theoretical contributions of Marxist and dependency theories which argue that value transfers go from less to more capitalized, from high to low rates of surplus value production. 

Since the authors emphasize terms of trade and bargaining power rather than transfers of value based on conditions of production, and propose a justice-based reform agenda for international institutions, references at least to RaĂșl Prebisch and Hans Singer, or Arthur Lewis would have been expected. This structuralist tradition perceives the root of inequality in the deviation of actual terms of trade from an ideal set of relative prices reflecting perfect competition (that is, the absence of any imperfections or external factors distorting the market). Strictly speaking, this entails a relative loss of potential gains from trade rather than a drain of economic surplus in the sense of unequal exchange.  

The latter term, unequal exchange, is historically grounded within a Marxist theoretical framework. Unequal exchange exists even in a domestic context as a result of between-industry competition, which had already been analyzed by Marx. On the international level, in addition to differences between capital compositions across industries and countries, persistent differences in wages and rates of surplus value come up as a second channel of value transfers. Arghiri Emanuel formulated this dual mechanism of value transfers, and pioneered unequal exchange studies more than fifty years ago. The term unequal exchange refers to unequal magnitudes of social labor being traded at the same price, which favors the imperialist center to the disadvantage of less capital intensive and lower wage conditions of production in the periphery. 

Nievas and Piketty add insult to injury by putting the term unequal exchange in the paper title – without even mentioning the work of Arghiri Emmanuel, Samir Amin, Ruy Mauro Marini, and many other thinkers. We encounter the same problem when the authors interpret the imbalance of net foreign asset holdings. Hilferding’s and Lenin’s analysis of capital exports as a strategy of accumulation beyond borders, as well as to enforce the dependency of the periphery, ground these phenomena in analysis. But the authors only cite them as examples for early empirical approaches to the topic and forgo any theoretical explanation of the root causes as well as the consequences of capital exports. 

Unlike some critics on social media, though, we do not regard this as some form of plagiarism, as their paper does not rely on the insights of the terms of trade, unequal exchange, or imperialism literature. At most, much like when Joan Robinson coined the term “bastard Keynesians” for those who cited Keynes only to reinforce earlier equilibrium models which Keynes’ theory overcame, we could speak of a bastardization of unequal exchange: they use the term in a purely descriptive way, deliberately ignoring its intellectual history, which allows them to avoid the discussion of capitalism as an exploitative mode of production with built-in tendencies to generate massive inequalities in income, wealth, and power within and across countries.

An alternative approach anchored in value theory

Marxist theory (and the classical political economics tradition in general) argues that commodity prices gravitate around centers that are regulated by the direct labor time necessary to reproduce a commodity as well as indirect labor used up in the form of capital inputs, and an economy-wide general profit rate. A substantial empirical literature corroborates this theory as a general empirical pattern. And the theory of unequal exchange is precisely concerned with unequal amounts of social labor being traded at the same monetary price: transfers of value. Once the underlying theory of value is discarded in favor of a subjectivist approach, as Nievas and Piketty do, there is nothing unequal being exchanged, strictly speaking.

Their interpretation of the impressive data collection is neither systemic nor structural in a meaningful sense. This extends beyond the usual lamenting that non-radical economists tend to suggest some original or desirable variety of capitalism exists out there, in the vast depths of textbook knowledge, only to be discovered through market-centered reform. The paper lacks any clear theory of price beyond the assertion of bargaining power. It is true that power imbalances enable individual capitals as well as states to push others into unbalanced patterns of trade and accumulation. The crucial point is, however, that the capitalist mode of production and reproduction self-regulates in ways that generate these power imbalances. Therefore, the main aim of (classical and modern) political economics is to grasp those regulatory principles.   

There is an alternative, nevertheless, and the extensive dataset compiled by Nievas and Piketty will help enable such systematic analysis. The unequal exchange literature provides a consistent framework to understand how imperialism operates in trade through transfers of value, through capital exports and debt traps, and in value capture by non production industries like finance and trade. In our forthcoming book titled , we provide a framework to estimate international value transfers brought up by the market mechanism (rather than distortions thereof) based on the tendential equalization of profit rates and non-equalization of wages (and rates of surplus value). This allows us to estimate the relative importance of differences in (1) value compositions of capital, and (2) rates of surplus in overall transfers of value through international trade. The same framework can also accommodate the analysis of value capture by non-production industries and capital exports, which makes use of exactly the kind of data Nievas and Piketty gather. Rather than relying on bargaining power as the dominant form of price formation, we show that labor values regulate the centers of gravity for market prices, and how competition expresses and deepens international inequalities. 

Difficulties mostly arising from the availability of data aside, the approach briefly outlined above has the crucial merit of integrating the spheres of production and circulation. It allows for studying various phenomena ranging from productivity differentials to trade accounts, from regularities between prices and values to terms of trade, from unequal exchange to power asymmetries on grounds of a materialistic understanding of society and history. A corollary, which might be charmless, or even repulsive to some, is the following: if all these are integral parts of the same totality called global capitalism, challenging one or more of them implies challenging the latter. This is the crux of the actual unequal exchange literature which Nievas and Piketty spirit away.

GĂŒney IĆŸÄ±kara is a a Clinical Associate Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University.

received his PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research in 2022. Patrick’s research gravitates around the political economy of labor, inequality and capitalism.

What if the story of economic development doesn’t begin with the market, but with the household? And what if property, often assumed to be a static bundle of rights, is better understood as a dynamic institution—adaptive, historically layered, and relational?

These questions sit at the heart of my recent research, which I had the opportunity to present at the Open University’s legal histories conference Land and Property Beyond the Centenary. While my work focuses on property governance and transformation in rural China, its implications stretch far beyond. It challenges dominant liberal narratives about property and development by presenting institutional change as a process of negotiated adaptation shaped by vulnerability and crisis, rather than a linear path towards free markets and individual ownership.

At its core, this work brings into dialogue three theoretical frameworks that are rarely combined: resilience theory, Martha Fineman’s vulnerability jurisprudence, and evolutionary institutional economics inspired by Thorstein Veblen. Together, they offer a rich toolkit for reimagining how development happens—and for whom.

Resilience Beyond Metaphor

‘Resilience’ is everywhere these days—from climate adaptation plans to corporate strategy documents. But in many of these settings, the term functions as a loose metaphor: a call to ‘bounce back’ from crisis, often without interrogating what resilience means, or whose resilience is being protected.

In contrast, resilience theory, which originated in ecological sciences during the 1970s (Holling 1973), initially defined resilience as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances while maintaining core functions (Walker and Salt 2006). Over time, the concept evolved beyond ecological sciences to address social and institutional dynamics (Humby 2014), culminating in an approach emphasising adaptive governance of socio-ecological systems (SES) (Folke et al. 2005; Duit et al. 2010).

Crucially, contemporary resilience framework is not about stability—it is about transformation under constraint. Applied to economic development, this approach shifts the focus away from fixed development goals (e.g., free markets, individual land ownership) and towards the processes and institutional arrangements that enable adaptation over time.

This is especially important in the context of land, property, and household governance—where liberal models prioritising formal markets and individual ownership often fail to capture the lived realities of economic life in the Global South. In this framing, resilience serves as a critical lens for analysing how property systems evolve under pressure, rather than functioning as a rhetorical term.

The Household as an Adaptive Institution

Nowhere is this more evident than in rural China, where the household has long operated as more than a private, familial unit. Historically, it was a key node in systems of imperial governance, tax collection, and collective responsibility. During the Maoist period, it was scaled up and subsumed into communes through collectivisation. And in the late 1970s and 1980s, it re-emerged as the cornerstone of agricultural reform under the Household Responsibility System (HRS).

Under the HRS, rural land remained collectively owned by the village committee or the collective economic organisation, but rights to use, manage, and benefit from rural land for farming purposes were contracted to individual households. These households—though not legal persons in a Western sense—became the operative economic units, making decisions about production, investment, and surplus. The state retained oversight, but the locus of everyday governance shifted to the household.

This arrangement defies standard models of property. It is neither fully private nor fully communal. It does not rest on individual title, yet it has enabled a massive increase in agricultural productivity, lifted millions out of poverty, and persisted for over four decades. From a resilience perspective, the HRS is a compelling example of institutional adaptation: a locally grounded, historically informed response to systemic crisis.

From Vulnerability to Institutional Support

Yet resilience alone is not enough. As Martha Fineman has powerfully argued, resilience must be understood in relation to vulnerability. Fineman’s (e.g., 2004, 2010, 2013, 2017) vulnerability theory challenges the liberal conception of individuals as fully autonomous, rational, and self-sufficient actors. Instead, she posits human vulnerability as universal and inevitable, experienced differently across the lifecycle but requiring continuous institutional support.

Central to Fineman’s critique is the reconceptualisation of resilience as a socially and institutionally constructed capacity rather than merely an inherent individual trait (Fineman 2013). Acknowledging universal vulnerability demands that resilience be understood as the outcome of supportive institutional structures. Fineman (2010) explicitly calls for a ‘responsive state’ that mitigates structural vulnerability by fostering institutional support. All human beings are vulnerable: to illness, to economic precarity, and to displacement or the loss of social support systems. What varies is how that vulnerability is mediated—through family, community, legal structures, or the state.

Fineman’s theory pushes back against liberal assumptions of autonomy and self-sufficiency. She reminds us that informality can also obscure deep inequalities, especially around gender and care. In China, for example, household-based land contracts have often been issued in the name of male heads, with women’s access mediated by marital status and household registration. This creates hidden dispossessions: when households divide, or when women marry out, their land rights can evaporate. It calls for what Fineman terms the responsive state: one that recognises universal vulnerability and designs systems to mitigate, not reproduce, inequality.

Bringing Fineman into dialogue with resilience theory helps refine our approach. Resilience is not just the ability to adapt—it is the product of institutional arrangements that distribute resources, manage risk, and support those most exposed to harm. Fox O’Mahony and Roark (2022) also note: resilience must not be confused with endurance alone; resilient property must be assessed in relation to how it confronts or reinforces structural injustice. Their work offers an important reminder that without state responsiveness and institutional accountability, resilience risks becoming a justification for inequality.

Veblen, Evolution, and Development as Process

The third strand of this framework—evolutionary institutional economics—adds another layer. In Veblen’s classic formulation, institutions evolve not through design but through selective adaptation: a process shaped by habit, experimentation, and context (Veblen 2007/1899; Hodgson 2012). What persists is not always what is deemed most efficient by liberal standards, but what is most compatible with prevailing ecological and socio-economic conditions.

This evolutionary logic is essential for understanding property and development in non-liberal contexts. It explains, for instance, why Chinese rural households could reassert themselves so effectively in the late 1970s. The HRS cannot be adequately explained solely as a spontaneous market-oriented response. Instead, it emerged from historically entrenched practices of household-based governance. The HRS adapted these historical institutional configurations to contemporary ecological and socio-economic conditions through years of local experimentation.

Veblen also helps us move beyond the binary of tradition vs. modernity. He shows that institutional change is path-dependent, historically situated, and plural. The Chinese case is not a ‘transition’ towards Western models of property—it is a trajectory of its own, shaped by deep histories of governance and human-land relations.

Implications for Development Economics

So, what does all this mean for development economics?

First, it urges rethinking the role of formal institutions and legal formality. As scholars such as Elinor Ostrom (e.g., 1990, 2010) have argued, communities often govern land and resources effectively through informal norms and shared practices. The challenge is not to impose external models, but to understand—and where appropriate, strengthen—the institutional arrangements that already exist.

Second, it calls for integrating vulnerability into development thinking. Much of the field still assumes economic agents are autonomous, rational, and mobile. But real people live in webs of dependency: caring for children, elders, or the sick; tied to households, identities, and places. Economic policy that ignores this—by targeting individuals instead of families, or by displacing informal systems in favour of abstract rights—risks deepening insecurity and inequality.

Third, it suggests taking history seriously. Rather than a fixed problem to be solved, development is an evolving process shaped by ecological pressures, socio-economic realities, and the dynamic interplay of conflict, negotiation, and cooperation across multiple levels of governance. The HRS did not emerge from a blueprint—it emerged from decades of failed collectivisation, suppressed local experiments, and shifting elite consensus. Development economists need to understand these dynamics, not just measure their outcomes.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this perspective opens space for a pluralist approach to institutions and property. There is no universal path to development, no one-size-fits-all model of governance. But by attending to how institutions adapt, absorb crisis, and respond to vulnerability, we can begin to build a more grounded, equitable, and resilient understanding of economic change.

Towards a Resilient Development Paradigm

The concept of ‘resilient development’ risks becoming another buzzword unless grounded in rigorous theory and empirical nuance. But used critically, it can become a powerful tool: a way to centre adaptation, institutional experimentation, and vulnerability in how we think about growth, property, and justice.

Rural China’s experience under the HRS offers one case study—but not a template. It reminds us that resilience is not about returning to an imagined past or leaping towards a market ideal. It is about building institutions that can change without collapsing, that can absorb shocks without sacrificing equity, and that can evolve with the communities they serve.

Development, in this sense, is not a destination. It is an ongoing negotiation—between people, institutions, and their environments. And perhaps the household, so often ignored or oversimplified in economic models, is one of the best places to begin.

References

Duit, A. et al. (2010) Governance, Complexity, and Resilience. Global Environmental Change, 20, 363–368.

Fineman, M.A. (2004) The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency. The New Press.

Fineman, M. A. (2010) The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State. Emory Law Journal, 60(2), 251–275.

Fineman, M.A. (2013) Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics. In M.A. Fineman and A. Grear (eds) Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics. Routledge, 13–27.

Fineman, M. A. (2017) Vulnerability and Inevitable Inequality. Oslo Law Review, 4(3), 133–149.

Folke, C. et al. (2005) Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 30, 441–73.

Fox O’Mahony, L. and Roark, M.L. (2022) Squatting and the State: Resilient Property in an Age of Crisis. Cambridge University Press.

Hodgson, G.M. (2012) Thorstein Veblen: The Father of Evolutionary and Institutional Economics. In E. S. Reinert and F.L. Viano (eds) Thorstein Veblen: Economics for an Age of Crises. Anthem Press, 83–296.

Holling, C.S. (1973) Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23.

Humby, T.-L. (2014) Law and Resilience: Mapping the Literature. Seattle Journal of Environmental Law, 4(1), 85–129.

Ostrom, E. (2009) A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems. Science, 325(5935), 419–422.

Ostrom, E. (2010) Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems. American Economic Review, 100(3), 641–672.

Veblen, T. (2007/1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. Oxford University Press.

Walker, B. and Salt, D. (2006) Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Island Press.

is Professor of Law at Essex Law School, University of Essex. Her research focuses on comparative property law; Chinese law; law, governance and development; and political economy. @TingXu7

by José Alejandro Coronado and

There is growing concern about the increasing emphasis on journal rankings in academia. This is of special consequence in economics: given theoretical and methodological cleavages, heterodox outlets tend to be marginalised in traditional ranking systems.

Despite this, journal rankings are used and may indeed be useful. , we explored how to build a ranking that appropriately reflects the reputation of heterodox economics journals amongst heterodox economists (Coronado and Veneziani, 2025).

We are not the first ones to build rankings for heterodox economics journals. Fred Lee and others (e.g., Lee et al., 2010; Cronin, 2020) developed heterodox economics journal rankings based on subjective peer evaluations combined with bibliometric indicators. These composite “quality” indices had the objective of measuring research quality in the heterodox economics community.

In contrast, we measure reputation and intellectual influence within the heterodox economics community by focusing exclusively on bibliometric indicators. Thus, we capture the views of the heterodox economics community through their citation choices.

To build our ranking we require, first, a tool to rank journals based on bibliometric data. We adopt the Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004) (PV) index — a theoretically-founded measure of intellectual influence within citation networks. Unlike simple citation counts or impact factors, the PV index accounts for both the quantity and the prestige of citations received, capturing the recursive structure of intellectual influence.

From a Broad Set of Journals to the Core

Second, we need to identify the set of journals to rank. This is easier said than done, lacking a clear, widely shared notion of heterodox or even heterodox-adjacent outlets. We begin by focusing on a comprehensive list of journals: we start from the set of outlets used in the influential study by Lee et al. (2010) and add a range of additional journals identified in more recent contributions (e.g., GrÀbner et al., 2018; Kapeller and Springholz, 2016). After excluding outlets with missing citation data, our database covers 119 journals and over half a million citations between 2000 and 2023.

While we do derive a ranking of this large set of journals based on the PV index (Table 1 in the paper), a closer look at the structure of the citation network raises some doubts on all rankings that focus on broad, comprehensive definitions of heterodox economics. For, the network structure is extremely sparse: journals form internally cohesive groups, but these groups barely cite each other. Indeed, the network effectively splits into two almost disconnected subnetworks. It is unclear that these journals bear a sufficiently close family resemblance to rank them together.

To overcome this problem, we follow an inductive approach: we use community detection techniques to let the citation data reveal which journals are actively part of the heterodox intellectual conversation, and we identify a tightly connected group of 14 journals, which we term the Heterodox Economics Core.

The Restricted Ranking: Results and Interpretation

The first table below (Table 3 in the paper) presents the ranking of the Heterodox Economics Core, using the PV index based on citations from the past five years.

Several things are worth noting: The Review of Keynesian Economics, founded only in 2012, ranks first, indicating its remarkable rise in influence within the heterodox community. Established journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Metroeconomica and the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics remain highly ranked. Journals like the Review of Radical Political Economics and Journal of Economic Issues rank lower than might be expected based on informal reputations.

Perhaps surprisingly, some outlets often associated with heterodox economics — such as Feminist Economics and Review of Social Economy — do not belong to the Heterodox Economics Core. Our community detection analysis shows that they belong to a separate cluster — which we call Social Economics and Inequality — with relatively weak citation links to the Heterodox Economics Core. Nevertheless, given their relevance in the community, we build an extended ranking that includes these outlets, and the other journals in their cluster, in addition to the core 14 journals.

The expanded ranking is shown in the table below (Table A1 in the paper) and it is immediately evident that the addition of these journals does not make a major difference.

Beyond the static ranking, Figure 2 in the paper traces the evolution of journal influence (for journals in the Heterodox Economics Core) from 2008 to 2023. It shows that significant shifts have occurred: RoKE has steadily gained ground, while the influence of Cambridge Journal of Economics, Metroeconomica, Review of Political Economy, and Journal of Post Keynesian Economics has somewhat declined over time.

These results are quite striking. Due to the strong network externalities in citation communities, one would expect that over time established journals cement their position as central nodes in the network, reinforcing their influence through cumulative advantage. Yet, the data reveal a more dynamic landscape within heterodox economics, where newer journals can rise rapidly, and established outlets can lose ground — suggesting that intellectual leadership in the field remains actively contested rather than ossified.

References

Coronado, J.A. and Veneziani, R. (2025). “Heterodox Economics Journals: A Network Analysis,” Metroeconomica.

Cronin, B. (2020). “Journal Rankings and Heterodox Economics.” Journal of Economic Issues.

GrĂ€bner, C., et al. (2018). “Towards a Pluralist Ranking of Heterodox Economics Journals.” Review of Political Economy.

Kapeller, J. and Springholz, F. (2016). Directory of Heterodox Economics Journals (6th ed.).

Lee, F.S., et al. (2010). “Research Quality Rankings of Heterodox Economic Journals.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology.

Palacios-Huerta, I. and Volij, O. (2004). “The Measurement of Intellectual Influence.” Econometrica.

José Alejandro Coronado is Lecturer in Economics at the University of Greenwich.

is Professor of Economics at Queen Mary University of London.

In recent years, the rise of platform monopolies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft has sparked a growing discourse among scholars and public intellectuals, many of whom describe these developments through the lens of a supposed return to feudal structures. This narrative, often labeled as techno-feudalism or digital feudalism, suggests that contemporary digital capitalism is no longer driven primarily by labor exploitation, but by rent extraction and control over digital infrastructures (Varoufakis, 2021).

Prominent left-leaning thinkers such as Yanis Varoufakis, Mariana Mazzucato, McKenzie Wark, Jodi Dean, David Arditi, and Robert Kuttner have employed the techno-feudalism framework to highlight the increasing asymmetries of power and wealth in the digital age.

The term has gained significant traction, not least because of its rhetorical force and capacity to evoke historical imaginaries of servitude, hierarchy, and immobility (Morozov, 2022). Yet its growing popularity has also introduced analytical imprecision, with many adopting the label as a buzzword rather than engaging critically with its implications. At first glance, the metaphor appears appealing: today’s tech giants resemble lords presiding over digital fiefdoms, extracting value from users and workers who have little choice but to submit to the rules of the platform. However, this article argues that such analogies are conceptually flawed and politically misleading.

Drawing on the tradition of critical political economy, this paper challenges the techno-feudalism thesis by contending that the digital economy remains deeply embedded within capitalist logics, particularly in its monopolistic and financialized forms. What we are witnessing is not a reversion to feudal relations, but an intensification of capitalist accumulation strategies under new technological conditions. Platform monopolies do not derive power from land ownership or inherited status, but from their capacity to commodify data, enforce algorithmic control, and monetize access to essential infrastructures—especially through cloud computing and digital platforms. These dynamics do not mark a rupture from capitalism but rather its latest mutation, in which market domination is achieved through the mechanisms of monopoly, not feudal hierarchy.

By debunking the techno-feudalism myth, this article seeks to redirect the critique toward the enduring structures of capitalist domination that continue to define the digital economy. Understanding Big Tech as capitalist titans, rather than digital lords, offers a more precise analytical lens for grasping the mechanisms of exploitation, accumulation, and control that shape the contemporary political economy of platforms.

Feudalism vs. Capitalism: The Essential Difference in Control Mechanisms

To understand why techno-feudalism is a misleading term, it is crucial to examine the fundamental differences between feudalism and capitalism. Feudalism was an economic and social system based on land ownership and coercive labor relations. Under this system, surplus value was extracted through extra-economy with political coercion, where lords exercised military and legal power to control serfs, who were legally bound to the land and had no economic freedom (Wood, 2002). 

Capitalism, on the other hand, relies on economic mechanisms to control labor and generate surplus value. In capitalism, exploitation occurs through the wage system and labor markets, where workers are formally free but are structurally compelled to sell their labor power in order to survive. Marx (1867/1990) in Capital Volume I explains that capitalism exploits labor not through direct political coercion, as in feudalism, but through economic mechanisms such as productivity, efficiency, competition, profit oriented, and control over the means of production. 

Table 01. Key Differences Between Feudal and Capitalist Economies

In the digital capitalist economy, Big Tech does not exercise direct political coercion over workers or users. Instead, it creates an economic ecosystem that compels participation. For instance, gig workers on platforms like Uber or Gojek are not legally bound to these companies, yet they are heavily dependent on them due to algorithmic management and digital labor market structures (Woodcock & Graham, 2019; Novianto, 2024). Similarly, social media users are not forced to engage with platforms like Facebook or YouTube, but the design of these platforms and their monopoly over digital communication infrastructures leave users with few viable alternatives. This form of control—structural dependence rather than legal coercion—is a hallmark of capitalism rather than feudalism. 

Digital Capitalism: Monopolies and Rent Mechanisms

One of the central claims of techno-feudalism proponents is that digital corporations no longer rely on labor exploitation in the traditional sense but instead extract value primarily through rent-seeking based on data and digital infrastructure. In the digital economy, economic value is often generated not through the production of physical goods but through the control of networks, algorithms, and user data. 

However, it is crucial to recognize that rent in the context of digital capitalism is not feudal rent but a new form of capitalist rent, enabled by digital monopolies. Srnicek (2017) in Platform Capitalism explains that Big Tech firms operate by controlling the digital infrastructures that underpin global economic activity. They create “walled gardens” where access to markets and services is tightly controlled, requiring participants to pay fees or share data as a form of rent. 

Amazon, for example, does not only profit from e-commerce but also from cloud computing services (AWS), which dominate global computing infrastructure. Google and Meta generate massive profits from user data, which is converted into economic value through targeted advertising models. In traditional capitalism, profits are extracted directly from wage labor exploitation; in digital capitalism, profits are also extracted by controlling access to data and digital networks, creating a form of rent based on monopolistic control (Sadowski, 2020). 

Beyond rent-seeking, another critical aspect of digital capitalism is its reliance on unpaid digital labor. Christian Fuchs (2014) in Digital Labor and Karl Marx argues that social media and digital platforms extract surplus value from users without directly compensating them. Unlike traditional wage labor, where surplus value is extracted through the exploitation of paid workers, digital platforms exploit users by monetizing their interactions, content creation, and engagement. 

For instance, every post, comment, or video uploaded to platforms like Facebook or YouTube generates data that is sold to advertisers, creating profit for the platform while users receive no direct economic compensation. This form of value extraction is unique to digital capitalism but remains consistent with Marx’s broader critique of capitalism: surplus value is generated by controlling the means of production (in this case, digital infrastructures) and appropriating unpaid labor. 

Why the Techno-Feudalism Narrative is Problematic

The narrative of techno-feudalism, while gaining traction in recent critical discourses, is deeply problematic both conceptually and politically. One of the central issues with this framework is that it obscures the underlying dynamics of capitalism itself. Referring to contemporary capitalism as a form of “neo-feudalism” risks misrepresenting the system’s inherent adaptability. As David Harvey (2005) argues in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, capitalism is not a static system—it evolves by generating new mechanisms of surplus extraction while preserving its foundational logic of capital accumulation. By labeling the current phase as feudal rather than capitalist, we may inadvertently overlook how these exploitative dynamics are not departures from capitalism but rather extensions of its logic under digital conditions.

Moreover, the techno-feudalism thesis tends to underplay the systemic tendency within capitalism toward monopoly formation. Characterizing Big Tech firms as “digital lords” ruling over users and workers evokes a historical analogy that ignores the long-standing critique of monopoly capitalism articulated by thinkers like Baran and Sweezy (1966). In their analysis, monopolistic structures are not anomalies but intrinsic outcomes of mature capitalist economies. The digital economy, with its heavy reliance on network effects and winner-takes-all dynamics, merely intensifies these tendencies, allowing dominant firms to consolidate control and shape economic life on an unprecedented scale.

Additionally, framing the current system as something beyond capitalism can dilute the force of anti-capitalist critique. If the prevailing system is no longer capitalism but a form of techno-feudalism, then the solution may be misconstrued as a return to a “purer” or more “competitive” capitalism, rather than a radical transformation of its core structures. This misdirection risks legitimizing neoliberal reforms under the guise of restoring market fairness, rather than addressing the deeper contradictions of capitalist accumulation and class relations.

In sum, while the metaphor of techno-feudalism may offer rhetorical power, it ultimately distracts from a more rigorous analysis of how digital capitalism functions. Rather than suggesting a rupture from capitalism, the current moment should be understood as an intensification of capitalist logics—particularly in their monopolistic, exploitative, and state-supported forms.

Conclusion: Platform Capitalism, Not Techno-Feudalism

The current digital economy is best understood as a continuation of monopolistic capitalism rather than a new form of feudalism. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta do not create systems of unfreedom akin to feudalism but instead use capitalist mechanisms—monopoly power, data-driven rent-seeking, and unpaid digital labor—to accumulate wealth. 

Rather than adopting the misleading term techno-feudalism, it is more accurate to analyze digital capitalism as an evolving system that amplifies traditional capitalist tendencies through new technological means. By recognizing the true nature of platform capitalism, we can develop more effective strategies to challenge Big Tech’s dominance and build a more democratic and equitable digital economy. 

References

Baran, P. A., & Sweezy, P. M. (1966). Monopoly capital: An essay on the American economic and social order. Monthly Review Press. 

Fuchs, C. (2014). Digital labor and Karl Marx. Routledge. 

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. 

Marx, K. (1990). Capital: Volume I. Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1867) 

Morozov, E. (2022). Critique of techno-feudal reason. New Left Review, (133), 89-126.

Novianto, A. (2024). Gamification From Below as by Form of Resistance: Algorithm Control, Precarity, and Resistance Dynamic of Indonesian Gig Workers. New Technology, Work and Employment.

Sadowski, J. (2020). Too smart: How digital capitalism is extracting data, controlling our lives, and taking over the world. MIT Press.

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press. 

Varoufakis, Y. (2021). Techno-feudalism: What killed capitalism?. Bodley Head. 

Wood, E. M. (1999). The origin of capitalism: A longer view. Verso. 

Woodcock, J., & Graham, M. (2019). The gig economy: A critical introduction. Polity Press. 

Arif Novianto is a researcher at Institute of Governance and Public Affairs, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia.  .

The failure of mainstream development policy to deliver on the promise of eradicating global poverty is increasingly difficult to deny (World Bank 2024). As a result, theories of global development are opening to alternative and critical approaches. In this context there has been a renewal of interest in dependency theory as a rich heterodox tradition of political economy (Kvangraven 2021; Chilcote and Salém Vasconcelos 2022; Antunes de Oliveira and Kvangraven 2024). In a , I turned to one of the foundational scholars of dependency, Walter Rodney (1942-1980), to work through some of the strengths and limits of dependency theory for contemporary studies (Johnson 2023).

Locating Rodney

was an Afro-Guyanese historian, political economist, and scholar of Africa and the Caribbean. He was also a Marxist. However, he treated the resources of historical materialism not as fixed and complete, but as an evolving body of theory and methodology to be developed through concrete empirical research. Rodney wrote a series of major books and essays, both scholarly and popular, and he was a committed political activist. He died much too early in his career, assassinated at the hands of his own government in the streets of Georgetown in 1980.

Rodney’s significance is evident in many fields. As a card-carrying historian with a PhD from SOAS, he is known by historians as an authority on Africa and the Caribbean. His dissertation, published in 1970 by Oxford, remains foundational in contemporary African historiography (Rodney 1970). In political economy, Rodney is best known for his monumental book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), which was written for a mass audience but is also rightly regarded as a classic work of dependency theory and world-systems analysis (Wallerstein 1986). Rodney is also regarded as a key theorist in the field of Black Studies, and, most recently, Rodney is treated as a central figure in the literature on racial capitalism (Jenkins and Leroy 2021).

Rodney’s work contains many resources still to be recovered and read for the problems of today. My own approach to this was to recover his final book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (1981), which is scarcely read. The book is neglected for several reasons. Most obviously, it is a painstaking work of primary research, written for specialists on Guyanese and Caribbean history. It does not have the range of his first book on West Africa or the political flair of his most famous book on imperialism and dependency in Africa. Moreover, the book was published posthumously. Rodney was assassinated around the same time that the Third World project itself was assassinated (Prashad 2007), giving way to the neoliberal turn and the debt crises of the 1980s. Theoretical fashions would track this turn, moving away from historical materialism and toward the more culturalist and ideational frame of postcolonial and decolonial studies.

For these reasons, I found Rodney’s final book ripe for retrieval as a work that exhibits a serious and creative application of a historical materialist framework to analyze capitalism and class in a concrete colonial setting. I sought to reintegrate this work into Rodney’s wider corpus and into the context of debates about Marxism, dependency theory, and world-systems analysis in the 1970s.

Three Contributions

I organized my findings regarding Rodney’s work into three main contributions. First, Rodney’s works contribute to the literature on the nature and history of capitalism, and especially the inherently international constitution of capitalist development. Second, Rodney offered a theoretically attuned and empirically grounded account of the central role of unfree labor in the history of capitalism. Third, Rodney mobilized the same framework to analyze the role of race and racism in capitalist class formation and capitalist development.

Regarding the first point, there are basically two conventional approaches within the Marxist tradition to the question of how to conceptualize capitalism as an object of critical study. The first emphasizes domestic class structure and focuses especially on the relationship between wage labor and capital (Brenner 1977; Wood 2001). The second emphasizes the international division of labor and views the classic form of capitalist large-scale industry analyzed by Marx as but one key node within a wider capitalist world system of production and exchange (Frank 1969; Wallerstein 1974). Unfortunately, these contrasting views often breakdown into one-sided polemics in which those centering class and production frame their work in opposition to those who center international flows of capital and labor.  

But Rodney’s work does not fit neatly into this division. This is clear right from the beginning, in his first series of studies of West Africa, in which Rodney analysed the formation of the European slave trade by centering the question of class formation both in Europe and on the African continent. Rodney argued that it was precisely through exploiting existing class hierarchies in Africa that the European traders were able to construct the transatlantic system of slavery, which was so essential to the early history of capitalism. Rodney’s account thus cannot be dismissed on the grounds that it posits international trade as the determining factor of capitalist development to the exclusion of an analysis of class structure (see Brenner 1977: 88). Rodney’s method takes as its aim the integration of structures of production and structures of exchange.

The second contribution I highlight flows from this theoretical framework and concerns the question of unfree labor in the history of capitalism. In the tradition of Eric Williams before him and of Immanuel Wallerstein after him, Rodney’s work grasps that capitalist production on a world scale involves multiple forms of labor, including various gradations of free and forced labor (as with Banaji 2011). This comes through especially powerfully in his book on working-class formation in sugar plantation economy of British Guiana. There, Rodney does away with formalistic theories on both sides of the theoretical divide. Capitalism is constituted neither by wage labor relations alone nor by an industrial core defined by wage labor and a periphery defined by bonded labor. Instead, Rodney’s analysis of colonial capitalism in British Guiana captured complex dynamics of labor control spanning wage labor, slavey, and indenture, in addition to the struggles of independent subsistence labor. This represents an important advance in theorizing core-periphery relations in the global political economy.

Finally, Rodney offered a unique contribution to the theorization of race and racism in a capitalist system. Rodney dealt with the difficult questions of race and class in various ways and for different audiences throughout his career. But it would not seem inappropriate to give special weight to his most mature and developed work on colonial capitalism and class formation. That work contains a remarkable chapter called “Race as a Contradiction Among the Working People.” While acknowledging that workers of African and Indian origins had inherited distinct and competing interests from a long history of struggle, the chapter challenges the dominant scholarly view that the whole of Guyanese history had been marked by persistent racial conflict among workers. Rodney rejected this primarily on empirical grounds: scouring the archives, the evidence to support such a claim just wasn’t there. Rodney thus offered an alternative and more constructive interpretation: the Guyanese working class suffered not from the presence of inherent racial conflict, but from the absence of a mature working-class political culture.

Rodney dedicated the last part of his life to the struggle to construct such a culture. Characteristically, Rodney pointed out that it was the elite classes (including professional academics) who benefited far more than working people from the idea that racial groups possessed inherently conflicting interests. Tragically, it was precisely this sort of thinking that put a target on his back.

Building on Rodney

What does all this mean for contemporary approaches to political economy and development? First, it means that we need to let go of rigid frameworks that split our understanding of capitalism into domestic and international compartments. It is not only possible, but imperative, to ground our studies of class formation and international development in their mutual and overlapping dimensions. Second, we need a better understanding of how capitalism has employed, and continues to employ, variegated forms of labor control (LeBaron and Phillips 2019). Third, and on the practical side, returning to Rodney can help clarify certain deadlocks in contemporary political discourse, especially concerning race and class.

Consider the endless debate on whether class is the primary concern of politics to the exclusion of racial identities, or whether attention to race and empire means ‘decentering’ class. Rodney teaches us that both of these positions are equally disastrous – and really two sides of the same coin. To ‘decenter’ class would certainly be a non-starter from Rodney’s perspective. But to abstract class from the social identities that cohere within classes would be no less absurd and self-defeating.

Rodney’s approach to the political economy of development embodies the imperative of class analysis, which leads us necessarily to grappling with complex social identities in an international frame. Returning to Rodney can aid us in pressing forward on all these questions in the analysis of concrete conjunctures, whether historical or contemporary.

References

Antunes de Oliveira, F. and Kvangraven, I.H. (2023) ‘Back to Dakar: Decolonizing international political economy through dependency theory’, Review of International Political Economy, 30(5), pp. 1676–1700. Available at: .

Banaji, J. (2011) Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Brenner, R. (1977) ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, pp. 25–92.

Chilcote, R.H. and SalĂ©m Vasconcelos, J. (2022) ‘Introduction: Whither Development Theory?’, Latin American Perspectives, 49(1), pp. 4–17. Available at: .

Frank, A.G. (1969) Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: historical studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks.

Jenkins, D. and Leroy, J. (eds) (2021) Histories of Racial Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Johnson, D.K. (2023) ‘Walter Rodney and the method of political economy: retrieving a critical-historical IPE’, Review of International Political Economy, 30(2), pp. 421–436. Available at: .

Kvangraven, I.H. (2021) ‘Beyond the Stereotype: Restating the Relevance of the Dependency Research Programme’, Development and Change, 52(1), pp. 76–112. Available at: .

LeBaron, G. and Phillips, N. (2019) ‘States and the Political Economy of Unfree Labour’, New Political Economy, 24(1), pp. 1–21. Available at: .

Prashad, V. (2008) The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York: The New Press.

Rodney, W. (1970) A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rodney, W. (1981) A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rodney, W. (2018) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Verso Books.

Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, I. (1986) ‘Walter Rodney: The Historian as Spokesman for Historical Forces’, American Ethnologist, 13(2), pp. 330–337.

Wood, E.M. (2002) The origin of capitalism: a longer view. London: Verso.

World Bank (2024) International Debt Report. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Available at: .

David Kenneth Johnson is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. His research examines the entwined histories of capitalism and empire, the political economy of US foreign policy, and international monetary hierarchy. His work has been published in Review of International Political Economy and Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of International Studies. 

Photo: .

By Charles Abugre and C.P. Chandrasekhar

In multiple ways multilateralism, or the coming together of the international community to further global good, is under challenge today. ‘Conflicts’, not least among them the genocide in Gaza, are an obvious challenge. But there is in the economic sphere a silent subversion of multilateralism underway that also needs to be stalled and reversed. This is the view that the “financing for development challenge” is so huge and the share of the private sector in the holding and disposal of the world’s financial surpluses so large, that it is only private initiative that can successfully implement the programmes needed to realise the SDGs and address damaging climate change.

The corollary of that position is that the role of governments is no more to try and move surpluses from private to public hands (through new forms of international tax cooperation, for example) but to use the available public resources as means to unlock private investments and expenditures. The call is to go beyond the recognition that the tasks of realising the SDGs, ensuring the needed carbon transition, and building resilience the world over, are primarily governmental or ‘public’ responsibilities, and that cooperation among governments (or multilateralism) is the best means to implement those tasks. Pragmatism demands, it is argued, that these tasks and therefore multilateralism, or the conjoint responsibilities of global governments, must be “outsourced”.

Nowhere is this view expressed more clearly than in the realm of the financing of sustainable development. A fundamental requirement of multilateralism in the economic sphere is the need to move money from the wealthy advanced nations to the less developed countries to finance mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage compensation; and to undertake the huge expenditures needed to realise the SDGs as a foundation of the struggle for peace. The dimensions of this ask come through, for example, from the estimates of financing requirements for less developed countries being cited at the COP29 summit in Baku, of around $1.3 trillion a year till 2030, which is to flow from the governments of the advanced countries to the less developed countries in the form largely of grants and concessional finance.

The case for flows from the developed to the less developed nations is now well known and well supported. Given the hugely disproportionate historical contribution of the developed countries to the cumulative total of global carbon emissions, and the principle accepted in the Paris agreement of “common but differentiated responsibilities, and respective capabilities”, the developed countries have to carry most of the responsibility to finance the carbon transition needed to realise the goal of keeping warming below the target ceiling of 1.5°C or 2.0°C range.

Moreover, since these expenditures are in most areas unlikely to yield any or significant monetary returns, while delivering large social benefits, interest-bearing borrowing cannot be a viable form of financing. Hence the need for these to be public flows in the form of grants or concessional loans which are in large measure grant-equivalent. This requirement is true of the financing needs for the SDGs as well. It is also true that in both cases—climate finance and financing for the SDGs—the requirements are so large that less developed countries, many of which are debt-stressed or have defaulted on their external debt payments, cannot be expected to raise the needed resources domestically.

And borrowing is not an option. They cannot borrow abroad because they are already in a position where chronic balance of payments deficits have made it impossible for them to carry the foreign exchange burden, forcing default in many cases. They can borrow at home more freely, but, in the presence of tax forbearance to incentivise private investment, a corollary of that is a large and rising interest payments bill that draws resources away from expenditures needed to provide social protection for and ensure resilience among already socially deprived sections of the population. In fact, the responsibility of the international community is now not restricted to providing new funds to address the crisis afflicting the global majority, but also to write-off part of the funds provided as credit earlier, on which substantial returns have already been garnered, to provide much needed fiscal leeway to less developed-country governments.

As noted earlier, the tasks set by these problems needing urgent responses must be shouldered by governments, especially, in the developed countries. Those countries carry the primary responsibility for this historically shaped crisis. The social benefits from addressing these problems are not just immense, but also global—the developed would also derive those benefits, not just the less developed, global majority countries, as UN Secretary General Guterres has reiterated. The private returns are too low and in some cases the risks too high for the private sector to take on the responsibilities, unless they do so as mere implementers contracted by government to a job in return for a fee. But even that kind of apportioning of responsibilities between the State and the private sector is unlikely to work, because the incentives of the two sets of actors are incompatible. Governments want to realise social benefits for the public good; the private sector wants to realise profits to further the agenda of corporate accumulation.

Fortunately, the moment is conducive for aggressive public action. Enough surpluses have been garnered and accumulated by big capital in the last 25 years (and more), and inequality has increased to such unprecedented post-World War II levels, that mobilising resources by internationally coordinated efforts at taxing the private sector can yield with little effort much of the capital required. Multilateralism has a role to play in mobilising resources, and not just in implementing the agenda.

Unfortunately, it is at this time of challenges and opportunities that the developed countries citing their own “domestic problems” are withdrawing from a much-needed global financing push. Climate finance negotiations bear witness. Instead, they are making a case to outsource what is clearly a responsibility only governments can bear to the private sector. The G20 as a grouping of the most influential of global actors must jettison this effort to “outsource” multilateralism.

Charles Abugre is a Ghanaian Development Economist and Executive Director of IDEAs

C.P. Chandrasekhar is the Global Head of Research and Policy at the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs)

In January 2023, Luiz InĂĄcio “Lula” da Silva, leader of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), began his third term as the president of Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America. The economic outlook is promising, with steady growth, controlled inflation, and declining unemployment rate. Despite challenges from a difficult Congress, Lula aimed to revive social and economic policies from his earlier terms (2002-2010). Simultaneously, he is pursuing an active international agenda focused on peace in the Middle East and Ukraine, environmental protection, and reforms in global governance. Brazil’s G20 presidency will conclude in November with a meeting in Rio de Janeiro that is expected to introduce new tax measures on billionaires and initiatives to boost environmental conservation. A Global Alliance Against Hunger will also be launched to tackle global issues.

This article explores the potential for necessary changes to meet Brazilian demands, concerns about the macroeconomic trajectory’s sustainability, and political tensions leading to the 2026 elections. The central argument is that Lula’s external strategy is closely tied to strengthening the internal disputes affected by neoliberal institutions. Success in this approach is vital not only for achieving structural improvements, but also for safeguarding the democratic regime, which faced threats just eight days after Lula took office.

FROM THE PLAN TO ECONOMIC REALITY

Lula’s first years in office have demonstrated promising economic results, surpassing market expectations with a growth rate of 2.9% in 2023 and a projected growth of around 3% in 2024, which is significantly higher than the anticipated 1%. This outpaced both Latin American and global growth averages. Key contributing factors include a substantial increase in exports driven by strong soybean and corn harvests and an increase in household consumption. The recovery of income transfer programs, an 8% increase in the minimum wage at the beginning of 2023, and a decline in unemployment stimulated this consumption. Additionally, successful negotiations in Congress allowed for extra spending, facilitating the resumption of the Bolsa FamĂ­lia program—Lula’s flagship social transfer initiative—which further enhanced the purchasing power of many families.

Inflation has also declined, dropping from 9.3% in 2022 to 4.5% by mid-2024. This reduction can be attributed to the appreciation of the nominal exchange rate and strategic changes in Petrobras’s pricing policies, a state-owned oil company. A high reference interest rate, maintained between 10% and 13%, has attracted capital inflows, contributing to the nominal appreciation of the Brazilian real, from six to five reais per dollar. This appreciation has helped ease domestic price pressures, while the abandonment of Petrobras’s import parity pricing has insulated fuel prices from international fluctuations. Moreover, unemployment rates have improved, decreasing from 8.4% to 6.4%, the lowest level since 2012.

Looking ahead, the projections indicate a slowdown in growth and controlled inflation, although several underlying risks remain. Estimates for 2025 anticipate a modest growth rate of 1%, reflecting the challenges within the neoliberal economic policy framework. The expected agricultural export boom may face obstacles owing to a 20% decline in international prices and severe flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, a crucial agricultural region. Additionally, gross fixed capital formation fell by 3% in 2023, particularly for machinery and equipment, signaling a trend toward productive disinvestment.

Specific tensions persist, especially regarding fiscal policy and proposed changes to public spending rules, along with the Central Bank’s focus on inflation targeting in its exchange and monetary policies. The New Fiscal Scheme (NFS) limits public spending by 2.5% per year and does not provide significant room for large-scale projects, such as the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) initiated after the 2008 financial crisis. The only way to create additional fiscal space is through tax increases. While newly approved taxes on ultra-wealthy investment funds and simplifications to consumption taxes may boost future tax revenues, they are unlikely to generate sufficient fiscal space for substantial economic initiatives. If inflation projections hold, the new formula for adjusting the minimum wage could lead to real improvements in workers’ living conditions, offering a glimmer of hope for economic growth.

Since June 2024, the international environment has prompted capital outflows and pressure for currency devaluation amid a strengthening dollar against emerging market currencies. This has led to an increase in the exchange rate from 5.10 to 5.85 reais per dollar, prompting government intervention. These exchange rate pressures could lead to higher inflation, and the Central Bank’s inflation targeting policy might necessitate increased interest rates, potentially dampening consumption—the sole growth vector thus far. The emerging prospects underscore the restrictive nature of neoliberal institutional frameworks. In a deteriorating international scenario, these frameworks significantly limit policies aimed at stimulating economic growth and job creation, likely undermining popular support for the Workers’ Party (PT).

THE DOUBLE FRONT OF POLITICAL DISPUTE

The first 22 months of Lula’s administration were characterized by two primary fronts of political engagement. The first is Brazil’s re-emergence on the international stage, where Lula’s charismatic leadership has brought attention to pressing global issues. The second front involves internal political struggles marked by negotiations with Congress and the “independent” Central Bank president. This internal conflict has necessitated a delicate balance to defend democracy amid rising tensions. Just eight days after taking office, Lula faced an attempted coup in BrasĂ­lia by right-wing groups reportedly backed by military elements, political parties, and the former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. A strong international condemnation, combined with decisive judiciary intervention, has played a crucial role in preserving democratic order.

Initial assessments suggest notable progress on both fronts, although external achievements have outstripped internal ones. Although Bolsonaro’s disqualification from elections until 2030 weakened the primary opposition, the threat to democracy remained palpable. The municipal elections last October showed enduring popular support for far-right factions. This dual strategy, addressing both international and domestic issues, acts as a cohesive mechanism; the international agenda creates a vital space for internal maneuvering, pressuring progressive institutional changes, such as implementing higher taxes on the wealthiest individuals. Historical experiences from Lula’s and Dilma’s administrations, particularly the parliamentary coup, demonstrate that meaningful transformation requires addressing more than just internal conflicts, as all parties, especially capital and labor, must benefit from these changes.

Confronting the Western neoliberal consensus is critical to preventing societal demands for transformation from being penalized by international financial markets, which can manipulate credit ratings and provoke tensions in exchange rates, inflation, and macroeconomic instability—elements that could be perceived as a “soft coup” by market forces. The push for a multipolar international system anchored in initiatives like BRICS is gaining traction, with the inclusion of new partners (BRICS+) becoming increasingly significant. A comprehensive strategy for sustainable growth and development has emerged as a priority, earning Lula invitations to key international events such as COP27 and rekindling relations with G-7 economies. This dual approach exemplifies how international relations can expand domestic political maneuvering.

On the local front, tensions in economic policy highlight two critical aspects of the neoliberal institutional framework: (i) fiscal policy and potential adjustments to public spending rules and (ii) the Central Bank’s exchange and monetary policy, which is heavily focused on inflation targeting. These tools are central to the functioning of the Brazilian state but often hinder democratic efforts to address urgent social needs, such as building larger schools and universities, improving the water supply in drought-affected regions, expanding healthcare coverage, and fulfilling other social commitments. Instead of resorting to street mobilization or constitutional referendums to break congressional gridlock, as seen in Colombia and Chile, Lula aims to foster a new international consensus to counter the global rise of anti-democratic ultra-right and fascist movements.

PERSPECTIVES FOR THE PT’S POLITICAL PROJECT

Emerging prospects can be framed in three possible scenarios.

1. Advancement of International Patterns: This scenario envisions a continued mandate for Lula or a successor, enabling deeper transformations that significantly enhance the quality of life of the majority. Economic results would ideally follow a path of gradual improvement, partially satisfying the basis of popular support and facilitating continuity through the vote in 2026.
2. Political Blockage: In this scenario, the outcome of Lula’s third term may fall short of maintaining popular support. This could create a political space for conservative sectors to promote a candidate from the economic and financial establishment, not necessarily linked to the ultra-right or Bolsonaro movement.
3. Polarization and Discontent: This scenario posits a complete disagreement with the results of Lula’s third term, leading to increased polarization between PT’s ideological supporters and a new leadership emerging from the extreme right, possibly figures such as SĂŁo Paulo Governor TarcĂ­sio de Freitas, or members of Jair Bolsonaro’s family.

Currently, the trajectory appears to lean between scenarios one and two. However, history reminds us that “unexpected” geopolitical, health, and climatic events can swiftly alter the course of events.

Sergio Martin Paez is Professor of Macroeconomics and Economic Development at the Institute of Urban and Regional Research and Planning (UFRJ-Brazil) and postdoctoral researcher at the same university with financial support from FAPERJ.

The Gender and Trade Coalition was initiated in 2018 by feminist and progressive activists to put forward feminist trade analysis and advocate for equitable trade policy.

This article is the fourth in a series of short, Q&A format ‘explainers’ unpacking key trade issues produced for the Gender and Trade Coalition by Regions Refocus. It was written by Erica Levenson (Regions Refocus) with inputs from Maureen Penjueli (PANG), Adam Wolfenden (PANG), and Ranja Sengupta (Third World Network). The authors give their thanks to Mariama Williams (Global Afro-Descendant Climate Justice Collaborative), who reviewed various versions of the article and provided helpful feedback. Read the full article and catch up on past explainers .

1. How is Trade Connected to Climate Change?

For the past 500 years in which capitalism has been the dominant economic system, continuing profit accumulation has been dependent on the unsustainable use, commodification, privatization, and destruction of natural resources on the one hand, and exploitation of human resources on the other. While natural resources have always fueled the metaphorical fire of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution greatly increased the ease and speed with which they could be destroyed. It is scientifically proven that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the main cause of climate change, with carbon dioxide (CO2) that results from the burning of fossil fuels as the number one source of warming and methane (largely emitted by the industrial agriculture sector) at number two. [1] Trade in particular has contributed to climate change: international trade alone accounts for an estimated 20–30% of annual GHG emissions.[2]

The current structural configuration of the economy, with trade at the center, is fundamentally incompatible with the reduction of GHG emissions. Free trade aims to expand the volume of trade in terms of production as well as consumption, so as to increase the potential gains to countries from

participating in international trade— as established by Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage.[3] But this theory pays no attention to the distributional impacts of free trade, or its environmental impacts. Trade-related production activities are often hugely detrimental to the environment and come at the price of forever contaminating or destroying essential ecosystems. Since all modes of transport— air, land, sea, and train shipping— are fossil fuel-dependent, an increase in consumption necessarily means an increase in GHG emissions. Gasoline and diesel power every form of shipping; maritime transport, fueled by diesel, makes up the majority of international trade in terms of both volume and value.[4]

Widespread trade liberalization has facilitated the consolidation of economic power, leading to worsening wealth inequality that directly corresponds to unequal responsibility for the climate crisis. Rapid and uneven economic growth over the last ~200 years has come at the cost of the environment and the majority of people: 157 multinational corporations (MNCs), the majority of which are based in the Global North, are responsible for up to 60% of global industrial emissions, and 20 fossil fuel corporations have contributed more than one third of total GHG emissions.[5] These corporations also hoard wealth: owned and managed by some of the richest people on the planet, they systematically exploit workers, consumers, and states to increase their own profits. The wealthiest 1% of people contribute as much to GHG emissions as the poorest 66% of the global population.[6]

Despite impending climate disaster, trade (dominated by MNCs) continues to be oriented towards increasing profit, consumption, and market control via liberalization and export promotion.[7] In the meantime, socioeconomic inequality is continuing to grow, and the situation of women and girls is drastically worsening, especially those living in developing countries (least developed countries [LDCs] and small island developing states [SIDS] in particular), as structural gender inequality intersects with both economic inequality and worsening climate change to further marginalize women. Critically analyzing the intersection of climate and trade from a feminist lens points out structural issues with the governance of both regimes, and highlights the urgency to take action on the “twin challenges” of worsening climate change and inequality. [8]

2. What is the Role of Corporations in Trade and Climate Governance?

Global governance systems have been set up to enable the continuing access of MNCs to markets and resources in the Global South so they can continue producing in the South for consumption in the North. As such, a key defining feature of both trade and climate governance is corporate capture by Northern-based MNCs and the Northern private sector more generally. Transformative climate policy agendas have been derailed by Northern MNCs, the private sector, and their governments, who want to continue with business as usual to preserve their profits and financial dominance even in the face of rapidly accelerating climate change.[9] These profits are built on the back of some of the world’s poorest women, whose labor forms the foundation of intricate global value chains (GVCs) and special economic zones (SEZs), two pillars of 21st century economies. Meanwhile, for decades, progressive economic agendas put forward by both states and civil society have been buried by these same actors for the very same reason. As a result of these stalled agendas of progress, both climate and trade policy have been widely criticized as ineffectual, the former for failing to bring about meaningful action to meet emissions targets, and the latter for failing to fulfill promises of shared prosperity and development.[10]

MNCs’ continued dominance would be gravely threatened by any legislation that takes meaningful action on either trade imbalances or climate change. The widespread mandated adoption of trade liberalization and related asymmetrical policy packages in the Global South has completely opened up markets to MNCs so they can dump cheap, industrially produced exports, albeit eliminating local producers across goods and service sectors.[11] Loss of livelihoods has caused poverty to increase, but chronic revenue shortfalls created by massive debt servicing and trade liberalization preclude government stimulus and investment in productive transformation, including climate action measures such as investing in renewable energy technology development. The investment protection and facilitation provisions contained in trade agreements have enabled natural resource grabs (including land, water, critical minerals, and agricultural raw materials) by corporations, and threatened both domestic value addition and trade on the one hand, and conservation and climate measures on the other. A lack of jobs relative to job seekers enables MNCs to get away with pervasive labor rights violations and provides them with a steady flow of cheap labor. On the climate legislation side, voluntary emissions reporting requirements and lack of systematic regulation shields MNCs from having to face accountability, allowing the cycle to continue repeating.

International financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank have argued that “trade can help shift production to areas with cleaner production techniques,” and that trade “promotes the spread of critical environmental goods and services that can help reduce emissions and improve environmental management.”[12] These claims propose no changes to the volume of trade while only slightly altering the composition, which barely scratches the surface of trade’s GHG emissions. Moreover, a key obstacle standing in the way of trade prompting any positive change on climate mitigation and adaptation is intellectual property rights (IPRs) legislation that is meant to safeguard profits through restrictive patents.[13] Given that most climate-related technology (especially renewable energy) has been patented by Northern corporations, technological innovation in the South has been limited if not impossible in most contexts.[14] So, while North-South technology transfer through trade is possible in theory, practical and regulatory barriers (such as the TRIPS agreement) have prevented it. Even in climate discussions, the transfer of necessary technology has proved to be the biggest barrier of all.

The dominance of the private sector in both climate and trade governance has replaced public priorities with private ones. The small changes to the economy currently being proposed pay lip service to the threat of climate change while doing nothing to address inequality (either between people or between countries) and repackaging the “same old approach of high consumption of goods, services, and energy.”[15] Also referred to as green industrialism or green colonialism, most existing proposals for economic reforms to mitigate climate change use climate concerns to entrench and exacerbate existing power imbalances in the economy. Structural changes urgently need to be made to both trade’s volume and composition; yet these are not on the table at the multilateral level.

3. What Trade-Related Environmental Measures Exist?

A growing number of climate measures are being incorporated into the trading system, supposedly to respond to concerns about the environmental effects of particular trade activities or agreements. Without significantly adapting their own production or consumption methods, or acknowledging their own historical climate debt, developed countries scapegoat the relatively low GHG emissions of developing countries as the main cause of climate change. A crucial way this fallacy is supported is through trade- related environmental measures (TREMs), which protect Global North interests under the guise of climate mitigation.

When TREMs were first introduced at the WTO shortly after its establishment in the 1990s (purportedly to address climate change), trade fundamentally changed.[16] The pollution haven hypothesis developed by heterodox economists draws a link between the migration of ‘dirty’ industries to developing countries and environmental regulation in developed countries, which has created a systemic dependence of developing countries on pollution-intensive industries.[17] Since Northern demand for these ‘dirty’ goods never went away, environmental regulations simply displaced their production. At the same time, TREMs proposed by Northern member states have sought to impose ‘sustainability standards’ which penalize developing countries for producing these goods while favoring Global North corporations who can produce and comply with those standards. Such frameworks are now being pushed into the WTO and in bilateral and regional trade agreements.

The concept of distinguishing between products based on processes and production methods (PPMs) was one of the first TREMs introduced at the WTO by Northern member states, but has ultimately not succeeded since it has been argued by Global South member states that PPM clauses would violate the WTO principle of non-discrimination.[18] Adopting criteria related to PPMs would give trading partners license to discriminate between otherwise identical products, and given the unequal distribution of ‘clean’ technology and ‘dirty’ production, would have disproportionate negative impacts on Global South countries. Similarly, the ‘food miles’ controversy in the mid-2000s saw Northern member states argue that producing food for export (which accounts for a large portion of Global South countries’ trade) was resulting in excess pollution, which justified levying tariffs on food imports.[19] On the contrary, most food exports from the Global South have smaller carbon footprints even with added emissions from shipping than food industrially produced in the Global North, and the countries who account for the bulk of food exports have very small overall carbon footprints, often exponentially smaller than those of the importing countries.

Even though PPMs, ‘food miles’, and other similar proposals have not been incorporated into legislation at the WTO, individual member states have sidestepped the WTO by adopting legislation which enforces these principles in all but name. The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), for example, imposes a tariff on carbon-intensive products including cement, iron and steel, aluminum, fertilizers, energy, and hydrogen imported by the EU. The EU claims that the intent of the CBAM is to “encourage industry worldwide to embrace greener technologies.”[20] The US followed suit, introducing its own version of the EU’s CBAM through national legislation in 2022.[21] Despite the CBAM’s growing popularity in the North, governments of the least developed countries (LDCs) have contended that given their specialization in carbon-intensive primary commodities, their economies will be disproportionately affected. According to UNCTAD, a $44 per ton carbon tax would result in a $2.5 billion increase in developed country incomes and a $5.9 billion decrease in developing country incomes.[22] The CBAM is just the latest in a long string of Global North countries’ transparent attempts to manipulate the global economy for their own benefit.

The supposed goal of the CBAM is crucial to achieve in order to mitigate climate change and could be legitimately achieved through direct finance and technology transfer. Technology remains an important part of the solution but implementing the CBAM without lifting IPR restrictions will produce chronic revenue shortfalls that further curb investment in development and fail to produce structural change because the necessary adaptation technology is patent protected. Moreover, the EU’s clean energy transition is dependent on carbon-intensive mineral extraction from the Global South (especially lithium and cobalt)– meaning that their demand for these products plays a major role in their production and related GHG emissions, which the CBAM is penalizing.

4. How Have Trade and Climate Governance Impacted Food Production?

Food insecurity is one of the most devastating manifestations of global economic inequality and is significantly worsening in the face of the climate crisis. The intrinsic importance of access to nutritious, affordable food has been overridden by the desire to accumulate wealth: trade in food was worth $1.7 trillion as of 2021, yet 783 million people are food insecure worldwide.[23] Trade in food is dominated by MNCs located in a small group of developed countries (‘agribusiness’); these MNCs are some of the richest in the world, and the single largest methane emitters.^{[i], [24]} Many of the most profitable food products for MNCs, including coffee, cocoa, and tea, are intensively farmed in the Global South by smallholder farmers; these farmers provide the raw materials that form the first link of trillion dollar value chains, yet the majority live in poverty and food insecurity.[25] Combined with chronic state underinvestment in smallholder productive capacity, rural economies– with women as the main economic agents in them– have been devastated by free trade. The livelihoods of hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, along with agricultural production for domestic consumption, have been decimated by MNCs. Their continued dominance and profits have come at the cost of the health of the environment and created food insecurity and poverty across the Global South.

Smallholder farmers manage 60% of global food production and 80% of total arable land.[26] In Africa, 70% of the economically active population is engaged in small-scale agriculture but this labor contributes an average of only 25% of national GDPs; as an average across Africa and Asia, small-scale agriculture provides an estimated 80% of domestic food production.[27] As an average across Latin America and the Caribbean, smallholder farmers contribute an estimated 50% of domestic food production, and in rural areas an average of 55% of the economically active population is engaged in small-scale agriculture.[28] Despite the crucial role they play, smallholder farmers in the Global South are some of the poorest people in the world, especially women smallholder farmers, who make up more than half of the small-scale agricultural workforce and who tend to produce less than male farmers due to their caring responsibilities.[29]

With markets pried open by trade liberalization and related inequitable policy packages, cheap imports of industrially produced, heavily subsidized food from the Global North have been systematically dumped into the South, suppressing the price of food and preventing farmers from receiving fair prices for their crops.[30] At the same time, agriculture is one of the most climate-vulnerable sectors, as climate change impacts such as changes to atmospheric makeup, water availability, and weather patterns determine soil health and crop yields.[31] Government subsidies in developing countries that could support both production and livelihoods have been targeted and constrained by WTO trade rules and agreements, including the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), leaving farmers and farming economically vulnerable. Without government support and sufficient financial resources, smallholder farmers can do little to mitigate the impacts of climate change on their crop yields, leading to worsening poverty rates and food insecurity, with women being the most impacted. Unilateral ‘sustainability standards’ being imposed (such as the CBAM) further exacerbate these challenges for the Global South.

Similarly, fisheries across the Global South are already seeing significant decreases in fish stocks due to overfishing driven by MNCs which is compounded by climate change impacts such as biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, rising sea temperatures, and coral bleaching.[32] This is particularly an issue in SIDS where small-scale fisheries have traditionally provided a source of livelihood for many of the poorest people, as well as a traditional component of local diets. Although women account for less than half of the people involved in small-scale fishing activities, they are disproportionately informally employed in the sector, leading to higher rates of job and food insecurity among women, as well as systematic discounting of women’s contributions to and challenges in the sector.^{[ii], [33]} Across the Global South, it is women farmers and fisherfolk who are disproportionately impacted by changing productive capacities of land and oceanscapes, in both their paid and unpaid work.[34] These are the people who would benefit the most from subsidies and preferential treatment provisions; as such, they are the most impacted by continuing injustice in WTO trade rules and recent negotiations on a fisheries agreement which would place similar constraints on developing countries’ subsidies to domestic fisheries.

In the case of both agriculture and fisheries, reductions in food production across the Global South due to climate change are further exacerbating dependence on industrially produced food imports.[35] Dependence on imports has huge macroeconomic effects as it makes states extremely vulnerable to external shocks and fluctuations in commodity prices, whether due to inflation or to economic crises. This leads to a cycle of debt creation at IFIs so states can pay for basic necessities such as food imports, that then leads to loan conditionalities which call for trade liberalization and pave the way for privatization, which in turn increases inequality, especially gender inequality.[36] Without intervention in the form of progressive trade legislation, this cycle endlessly repeats, as the loans and conditionalities were never intended to ‘solve’ any problems but rather to lock in and exacerbate existing ones.

5. Strategic Policy Proposals

As trade liberalization continues to accelerate, deepening inequality and ushering total ecological collapse closer and closer, multilateralism is flailing. There is a lack of willingness on the part of the Global North to engage with historical injustices, including the financial and climate debt they accumulated during colonialism and during their own industrialization processes. Despite the widely publicized ‘win’ constituted by establishment of the Loss and Damage Fund, there have been major issues in capitalizing the fund, including disagreement over previously agreed yearly targets. Even contested spaces such as the WTO are losing their power as member states feel emboldened to sidestep multilateral precedents, processes, and rules altogether and implement unilateral measures. Poverty, climate change, food insecurity, economic inequality, and gender inequality are all worsening, while a select few continue to get richer. To breathe new life into stalled climate and economic agendas of transformation, progressive policy measures need to be passed and implemented within a challengingly short period of time. As such, policy recommendations include:

1. Abandon trade liberalization as a blanket policy goal. By prying markets open before domestic industries have been sufficiently nurtured– which has in developed countries consisted of significant subsidies and protectionism, antithetical to the current model of trade liberalization being pushed by the same countries– developing countries have faced unfair competition from foreign products and been systematically deprived of trade revenue. Lack of policy space due to unfair trade rules has restricted their ability to improve their terms of trade, and precluded necessary investments in productive transformation, economic diversification, decreasing gender inequality, and climate adaptation and mitigation. Abandoning trade liberalization as a blanket policy goal facilitates a balanced pursuit of all three dimensions of sustainable development– economic, social, and environmental– through trade policies.
   
   
2. Revise relevant trade rules and agreements, including the WTO’s AoA, to allow developing countries to provide subsidies to their agriculture and fisheries sectors. As food production plays a major role in the economies of developing countries, as well as global food security, states must have the policy space to provide subsidies to their farmers and fisherfolk, most of whom are smallholders. Subsidies will improve not only the livelihoods of small-scale producers, and therefore their food security, but also their productive capacity and their ability to invest in sustainable technologies and productive assets. This is particularly necessary for small-scale women producers, who are burdened by unequal responsibility for care work and struggle to produce as much as men. If combined with investment in increasing domestic productive capacity, more food can be produced for domestic consumption, and reliance on food imports from the Global North can decrease. This would have broad stabilizing effects across national economies, making balanced, gender-responsive development possible. At the same time, industrial agriculture and fishing need to be disciplined by future agreements to prevent further loss and damage in the Global South.
   
   
3. Invest in public services. This will raise the general wellbeing of the entire population but will be particularly transformative for women as it will decrease their burdens of unpaid care work which are growing as they face rising poverty, food insecurity, and displacement in the face of climate change. Furthermore, MNCs have begun privatizing what should be state-led processes such as adapting food systems to meet the changing needs of populations in light of climate change, presenting the danger that corporations will cement their hold over the Global South once and for all through the climate crisis. Only an active state can discipline corporations and prevent what is sure to be a disastrous course for the Global South, and particularly for women.
   
   
4. Waive IPR restrictions, including the commitments under the TRIPS Agreement and bilateral and regional trade agreements, on climate-related technology. Such a waiver has been a long-standing call of developing countries in various multilateral fora, as it is crucial to ensuring necessary technology transfer from developed to developing countries.[37] Although the need for transfer of climate- related technology is included as a binding requirement in the 2016 Paris Agreement– and in various non-binding multilateral agreements including the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2001 Doha Ministerial Declaration– in practice developed countries have not shown willingness to engage in non-commercial technology transfer, meaning beyond the expectation that such transfer will occur through trade.[38] Since stringent IPRs are the main obstacle standing in the way of technology transfer, waiving IPR restrictions on climate-related technology is necessary to enable fulfillment of existing commitments, both binding and non-binding.
   
   
5. Integrate common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR), which is a well-recognized principle in climate negotiations, as a core principle in all trade agreements and policymaking. Developing countries have historically contributed very little to climate change and therefore should not be the primary targets of trade-related environmental sustainability efforts. It is developed countries who continue to be the largest emitters and the largest consumers, and their adaptation must be the subject of regulation. Developing countries have the right to develop their economies in light of climate constraints at their own pace and in their own ways, while addressing social concerns. Integrating CBDR into all trade negotiations– in particular to negotiations on agreements that involve environmental sustainability as an objective– would act as a countermeasure against unilateral TREMs passed by member states which unfairly penalize developing countries and disregard historical climate debt.

Notes 

^[i] Methane is the second-largest contributor to climate warming, after only carbon dioxide. Atmospheric methane levels have more than doubled in the last 200 years, which is estimated to be correlated to 20-30% of total warming. See NASA 2024 for more information.

^[ii] There is a long-standing debate about how ‘fisheries’ are defined, as a more narrow definition tends to exclude fishing activities women are overrepresented in. See FAO, Duke University, and WorldFish 2023 for further discussion.

[1] IPCC 2023.

[2] WTO 2022.

[3] Rodrik 2018.

[4] Balogh and Mizik 2021.

[5] Haddad, Steenbergen, and Saurav 2023; Taylor and Watts 2019.

[6] Khalfan et al. 2023.

[7] Fremstad and Paul 2022; Williams and Bandele 2019.

[8] Khalfan et al. 2023, ix.

[9] Christensen et al. 2023; Gunderson, Stuart, and Petersen 2018.

[10] See for example: Gilbert, Beladi, and Oladi 2015; Gunderson, Stuart, and Petersen 2018; Orasche et al. 2024; Siddiqui 2015.

[11] Hormeku-Ajei 2018.

[12] Brenton and Chemutai 2021, ix.

[13] Littleton 2008; Khor et al. 2017; Yu 2009; Zhou 2019; ‘t Hoen 2016.

[14] Hutchinson 2012; Khor et al. 2017; Littleton 2008; Taubman and Watal 2010; Yu 2009; Zhou 2019.

[15] Feffer 2023; Greenwood 2021.

[16] Khor 2010; Third World Network 1994.

[17] See for example: Akbostanci, Tunç, and TĂŒrĂŒt-Asik 2007; Feffer 2023; Mani and Wheeler 1998.

[18] Khor 2010.

[19] Lewis and Mitchell 2014.

[20] European Commission 2023.

[21] Reinsch and Duncan 2022.

[22] UNCTAD 2021.

[23] UNCTAD 2024; WHO 2024.

[24] Changing Markets Foundation and IATP 2022; Greenpeace 2023; Gura and Meienberg 2013.

[25] Jain 2023; Khalfan et al. 2023; Liu, Semrau, and Hanley 2021; Oxfam 2023.

[26] Loukos and Arathoon 2021.

[27] Odiwuor 2022.

[28] Loukos and Arathoon 2021.

[29] Ibid. See also: Jafry 2012.

[30] Banerji and Willoughby 2019; Murphy and Hansen-Kuhn 2017.

[31] Arora 2019; Malhi, Kaur, and Kaushik 2021.

[32] FAO, Duke University, and WorldFish 2023; Wolfenden and Sengupta 2021.

[33] FAO, Duke University, and WorldFish 2023.

[34] Cohen and van der Meulen Rodgers 2021; Goldsworthy 2010; Jafry 2012.

[35] Clapp 2009.

[36] Meijers and Brachet 2021; Williams and Bandele 2019.

[37] Khor et al. 2017.

[38] Ibid.

References

Akbostanci, Elif, G. Ipek Tunç, and Serap TĂŒrĂŒt-Asik. 2007. “Pollution Haven Hypothesis and the Role of Dirty Industries in Turkey’s Exports.” Environment and Development Economics 12 (2): 297–322..

Arora, Naveen Kumar. 2019. “Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture Production and Its Sustainable Solutions.” Environmental Sustainability 2 (2): 95–96..

Balogh, JeremiĂĄs MĂĄtĂ©, and TamĂĄs Mizik. 2021. “Trade–Climate Nexus: A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Economies 9 (3)..

Banerji, Sabita, and Robin Willoughby. 2019. “Addressing the Human Cost of Assam Tea: An agenda for change to respect, protect and fulfil human rights on Assam tea plantations.” Oxfam.

Brenton, Paul, and Vicky Chemutai. 2021. “The Trade and Climate Change Nexus: The Urgency and Opportunities for Developing Countries.” World Bank.

Changing Markets Foundation and Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy (IATP). 2022. “Emissions Impossible: How emissions from big meat and dairy are heating up the planet.”

Christensen, Martin-Brehm, Christian Hallum, Alex Maitland, Quentin Parrinello, Chiara Putaturo, Dana Abed, Carlos Brown, Anthony Kamande, Max Lawson, and Susana Ruiz. 2023. “Survival of the Richest: How We Must Tax the Super-Rich Now to Fight Inequality.” Oxfam.

Clapp, Jennifer. 2009. “Food Price Volatility and Vulnerability in the Global South: Considering the Global Economic Context.” Third World Quarterly 30 (6): 1183–1196..

Cohen, Jennifer, and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers. 2021. “The Feminist Political Economy of Covid-19: Capitalism, Women, and Work.” Global Public Health 16 (8–9): 1381–1395.

European Commission. 2023. ‌“Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) starts to apply in its transitional phase.” Press release.

Feffer, John. 2023. “Challenging the Global North’s ‘Clean Energy’ Transition.” Foreign Policy in Focus, 23 August 2023.

FAO, Duke University, and WorldFish. 2023. “Illuminating Hidden Harvests – The contributions of small-scale fisheries to sustainable development.” .

Fremstad, Anders, and Mark Paul. 2022. “Neoliberalism and Climate Change: How the Free-Market Myth Has Prevented Climate Action.” Ecological Economics 197.  .

Gilbert, John, Hamid Beladi, and Reza Oladi. 2015. “North–South Trade Liberalization and Economic Welfare.” Review of Development Economics 19 (4): 1006–1017. .

Goldsworthy, Heather. 2010. “Women, Global Environmental Change and Human Security.” In

Global Environmental Change and Human Security, edited by Jon Barnett, Richard A. Matthew, Bryan McDonald, and Karen L. O’Brien, 215–235. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Greenpeace. 2023. “Unchecked, unregulated, unaccountable: how big agribusiness corporations get rich amid crisis.” Greenpeace International, 28 February 2023.

Gunderson, Ryan, Diana Stuart, and Brian Petersen. 2018. “Ideological Obstacles to Effective Climate Policy: The Greening of Markets, Technology, and Growth.” Capital & Class 42 (1): 133–160..

Gura, Susanne, and François Meienberg. 2013. “Agropoly – A handful of corporations control world food production.” Berne Declaration (BD) & EcoNexus.

Haddad, Mona, Victor Steenbergen, and Abhishek Saurav. 2023. “Why large multinational firms hold the key to accelerating countries’ decarbonization strategies.” World Bank Blogs, 23 May 2023.

Hormeku-Ajei, Tetteh. 2018. “Agriculture, Rural Livelihood and Structural Economic Transformation in Africa.” In Reimagining Regionalism: Heterodox and Feminist Policy Proposals from Africa and the Caribbean, edited by Anita Nayar and Kathryn Tobin, 17–22. Regions Refocus.

Hutchinson, Cameron J. 2012. “Does TRIPS Facilitate or Impede Climate Change Technology Transfer into Developing Countries?” University of Ottawa Law & Technology Journal 3 (2): 517–537, 2006.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2023. “Summary for Policymakers.” In Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report, Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1–34.

Jafry, Tahseen. 2012. “Global Trade and Climate Change Challenges: A Brief Overview of Impacts on Food Security and Gender Issues.” International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management 4 (4): 442–451..

Jain, Sanket. 2023. “India’s paradox of surplus grains and soaring food insecurity.” Devex, 7 December 2023.

Khalfan, Ashfaq, Astrid Nilsson Lewis, Carlos Aguilar, Jaqueline Persson, Max Lawson, Nafkote Dabi, Safa Jayoussi, and Sunil Acharya. 2023. “Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99%.” Oxfam..

Khor, Martin. 2010. “The Climate and Trade Relation: Some Issues.” Research Paper 29, South Centre.

Khor, Martin, Manuel F. Montes, Mariama Williams, and Vicente Paolo Yu III. 2017. “Promoting Sustainable Development by Addressing the Impacts of Climate Change Response Measures on Developing Countries.” Research Paper 81, South Centre.

Lewis, Meredith K., and Andrew D. Mitchell. 2014. “Food Miles: Environmental Protection or Veiled Protectionism?” Michigan Journal of International Law 35 (3): 579–636.

Littleton, Matthew. 2008. “The TRIPS Agreement and Transfer of Climate Change-Related Technologies to Developing Countries.” Working Paper No. 71, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).

Liu, Wan-Hsin, Finn Ole Semrau, and Aoife Hanley. 2021. “International coffee trade: Multinational corporations should take more responsibility.” Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 28 January 2021.

Loukos, Panos, and Leslie Arathoon. 2021. “Landscaping the agritech ecosystem for smallholder farmers in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Technical Note No. IDB-TN-2084, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Malhi, Gurdeep Singh, Manpreet Kaur, and Prashant Kaushik. 2021. “Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture and Its Mitigation Strategies: A Review.” Sustainability 13 (3). .

Mani, Muthukumara, and David Wheeler. 1998. “In Search of Pollution Havens? Dirty Industry in the World Economy, 1960 to 1995.” The Journal of Environment & Development 7 (3): 215–247..

Meijers, Gea, and Isabelle Brachet. 2021. “The EU’s global trade and investment agenda, environmental pressures and gender equality.” In Why the European Green Deal needs ecofeminism: Moving from gender-blind to gender-transformative environmental policies, 68–75. European Environmental Bureau (EEB) and Women Engage for a Common Future (WECF).

Murphy, Sophia, and Karen Hansen-Kuhn. 2017. “Counting the Costs of Agricultural Dumping.” IATP.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 2024. “Vital Signs | Methane.” NASA, February 2024.

Odiwuor, Florence. 2022. “Women Smallholder Farmers: What is the Missing Link for the Food System in Africa?” Wilson Center, 7 December 2022.

Orasche, JĂŒrgen, Kari C. Nadeau, Antonia Schuster, Johan Rockström, Cezmi A. Akdis, and Claudia Traidl‐Hoffmann. 2024. “Climate Crisis Paralysis: Accelerating Global Action for Health Resilience in a Changing World.” Allergy 79: 1653–1655..

Oxfam. 2023. “Chocolate giants reap huge profits as promises to improve farmers’ incomes ring hollow.” Press release.

Reinsch, William Alan, and Elizabeth Duncan. 2022. “Trade Tools for Climate: Transatlantic Carbon Border Adjustments.” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 20 July 2022.

Rodrik, Dani. 2018. “What Do Trade Agreements Really Do?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 32 (2): 73–90.

Siddiqui, Kalim. 2015. “Trade Liberalization and Economic Development: A Critical Review.” International Journal of Political Economy 44 (3): 228–247..

Taubman, Antony, and Jayashree Watal. 2010. “The WTO Trips Agreement – A Practical Overview for Climate Change Policymakers.” Intellectual Property Division Background Note, WTO.

Taylor, Matthew, and Jonathan Watts. 2019. “Revealed: The 20 Firms Behind a Third of All Carbon Emissions.” The Guardian, 9 October 2019.

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). 2021. “A European Union Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism: Implications for developing countries.” UNCTAD, 14 July 2021.

UNCTAD. 2024. “New UNCTAD-WHO analysis reveals trends in processed foods trade.” UNCTAD, 7 March 2024.

Williams, Mariama, and Yinka Bandele. 2019 (unpublished). “An Initial Exploration of the Trade-Gender-Climate Change Nexus and its Interlinkages to Sustainable Development.” Commonwealth Secretariat.

Wolfenden, Adam, and Ranja Sengupta. 2021. “Protecting the Problem: Fisheries subsidies negotiations and the WTO.” TWN Info Service on WTO and Trade Issues, Third World Network.

World Health Organization (WHO). 2024. “Hunger numbers stubbornly high for three consecutive years as global crises deepen: UN report.” WHO, 24 July 2024.

WTO. 2022. “Trade and Climate Change Information Brief No. 4: The carbon content of international trade.”

Yu, Vicente Paolo III. 2009. “Developing Country Perspectives on Carbon-Based Competitiveness, Trade and Climate Change Linkages.” Energy, Environment and Development Programme (EEDP) Paper 09/04, Chatham House.

Zhou, Chen. 2019. “Can Intellectual Property Rights within Climate Technology Transfer Work for the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement?” International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 19 (1): 107–122..

’t Hoen, Ellen. 2016. Private Patents and Public Health: Changing Intellectual Property Rules for Access to Medicines. Amsterdam: Health Action International.