Jomo Kwame Sundaram

International financial institutions (IFIs) have typically imposed wide-ranging policy reforms—called “conditionalities”—in exchange for country governments to secure access to financial assistance.

Over the last four decades, growing concentration of market power in the hands of oligopolies, if not monopolies, has been greatly enabled by ostensibly neoliberal reforms, worsening wealth concentration and gross inequalities in the world.

In most cases of privatisation, some outcomes benefit some, which serves to legitimise the change. Nevertheless, overall net welfare improvements are the exception, not the rule.

For two centuries, all too many discussions about hunger and resource scarcity have been haunted by the ghost of the parson Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus warned that rising populations would exhaust resources, especially those needed for food production. Exponential population growth would outstrip food output.

After US President Donald Trump withdrew from Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), involving 12 countries on the Pacific rim, on his first day in office, Japan, Australia and their closest allies proposed and promoted the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) to draw the US back into the region to counter China's fast-growing power and influence.

Economic inequality—involving both income and wealth concentration—has risen in nearly all world regions since the 1980s.

A new United Nations report warns that the potential benefits to developing countries of digital technologies are likely to be lost to a small number of successful first movers who have established digital monopolies.

The world economy remains tepid and unstable a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, while growing trade conflicts are symptoms of deeper economic malaise, according to a new United Nations publication.

George Soros, Bill Gates and other pundits have been predicting another financial crisis. In their recent book, Revolution Required: The Ticking Bombs of the G7 Model, Peter Dittus and Herve Hamoun, former senior officials of the Bank of International Settlements, warned of "ticking time bombs" in the global financial system waiting to explode, mainly due to the policies of major developed countries.

In early 2016, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement—involving twelve countries on the Pacific Ocean rim, including the USA—was signed in New Zealand. Right after his inauguration in January 2017, newly elected US President Donald Trump withdrew from the TPP, effectively killing the agreement as its terms require the participation of both the US and Japan.

Over the last few decades, people in the developing world have been rejecting the intellectual property (IP) regime as it has been increasingly imposed on them following the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) including its trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) regime. IP rights (IPRs) have been further enforced through ostensible free trade agreements (FTAs) and investment treaties

As feared, the Eleventh Ministerial Conference (MC11) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 10-13, 2017 ended in failure. It failed to even produce the customary ministerial declaration reiterating the centrality of the global trading system and the importance of trade as a driver of development.

Emerging market governments often draw lessons from previous financial crises—or at least claim to do so—to prevent their recurrence. However, such preventive measures are typically designed to address the causes of the last crisis, not the next one.

Although quite selective, targeted, edited and carefully managed, last year's Panama Papers highlighted some problems associated with illicit financial flows, such as tax evasion and avoidance.

Various different, and sometimes contradictory, lessons have been drawn from the 1997–1998 East Asian crises. Rapid or V-shaped recoveries and renewed growth in most developing countries in the new century also served to postpone the urgency of far-reaching reforms.