Thursday 18 February, 2010 - 11:58
The People’s Budget Campaign (PBC) is a civil society coalition comprising of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the South African NGO Coalition (SANGOCO). This coalition has for the past ten years tabled proposals on the spending of revenue by the National Treasury and argued for a participatory budget process.
Tuesday 26 January, 2010 - 22:20
The United Nations (UN) Stabilisation Mission in Haiti has announced that a Joint Operations Tasking Centre will start operating to coordinate the huge relief efforts in that country.
The mission also sought to clarify the position of the Haitian government and the urgent need that remains a daily reality for hundreds of thousands.
Tuesday 26 January, 2010 - 22:08
Junior Chamber International (JCI), a global agency with a chapter in Rwanda, has trained over 1 500 entrepreneurs on how to grow their businesses in the last eight months.
JCI Rwanda's incoming president, Fabrice Ngoga, says that the agency will continue partnering in the country's development especially through empowering young people with skills to do business.
"We have a mandate of changing lives, we are happy with the activities in the past year and JCI will continue reaching out and impacting people," argues Ngoga.
The recent collapse of the banking system and instability in the financial markets has dramatically shaken confidence in the global economic order. Is the current variant of 'free market' capitalism really sustainable?
Wednesday 7 October, 2009 - 10:44
Oxfam International has criticised the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for celebrating three percent increase in the voting power for poor countries.
Oxfam's advocacy director, Bernice Romero, says the institutions are still far from being accountable to the people hit hardest by the global financial crisis.
Romero says that the G20 have mandated the IMF and the World Bank to tackle the economic crisis globally and for this response to be effective, adding that their decisions need to involve more than a handful of rich countries.
Monday 5 October, 2009 - 17:03
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has raised growth forecasts for most economies as the global economy pulls out of a steep nosedive, but warned recovery faces stiff headwinds.
The IMF projects that the global economy would shrink 1,1 percent this year and rebound to annualised growth of 3.1 percent in 2010, better than July forecasts of a 1.4 percent contraction in 2009 and 2.5 percent growth in 2010.
Tuesday 29 September, 2009 - 17:59
Over 50000 clothing workers downed tools Monday after wage negotiations between the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (Sactwu) and Appelo Manufactures of Southern Africa deadlocked.
Sactwu general secretary André Kriel said the strike had been suspended a week ago after the intervention of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) .
“Section 150 of the Labour Relations Act allows the CCMA to intervene if it feels the resolution of the dispute would be in the public interest,” Kriel said.
The purpose of this book is to re-examine major issues in contemporary development economics. Much is currently being made of the World Bank‘s apparent retreat from the neoliberal market economics of the Washington Consensus. New concepts and priorities like social capital and governance have been taken on board alongside the continuing pressures on developing countries for deregulation, privatisation, free trade and so on. But how much has really changed?
There is no alternative - to neo-liberal economics, Americanisation and globalisation - remains the driving assumption within the international development policy establishment. Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel explain the main assertions of this dominant school. They combine data, a devastating economic logic, and an analysis of the historical experiences of leading Western and East Asian economies, to question the validity of the neo-liberal development model.
While the international community has made a commitment to achieving full employment and decent work for all, this goal seems ever more distant in view of recent trends such as the growing unemployment and underemployment, the phenomenon of 'jobless growth', the growing 'casualisation' of employment relations, the promotion of labour flexibility at the expense of welfare security, de-industrialisation and the continued decline of peasant agriculture.
