Theme: Institutional Reform Archives

Call for Papers: Third Annual Amartya Sen Prize Competition

2016-02-01 By ASAP Global

Submission Deadline: August 29, 2016

ASAP, Global Financial Integrity and the Yale Global Justice Program are soliciting original essays of ca. 7,000 to 9,000 words on the non-revenue impact of curbing illicit financial flows for the third annual Amartya Sen Prize.

Poor populations are hurt when rich individuals and multinational corporations surreptitiously shift trillions of dollars in wealth and profits out of less developed countries. One harm arises from the loss of tax revenues incurred by their governments. By concealing their profits or wealth, MNCs and individuals evade taxes on profits, dividends, interest and/or capital gains—taxes that could fund social spending or tax reductions for ordinary citizens.

This year’s submissions are to focus on the other harm from illicit financial outflows: the loss of capital to a poor country’s economy, which may well substantially exceed the revenue loss. Such capital loss occurs when, often to dodge taxes or tariffs, individuals and companies of all sizes move wealth and profits offshore illicitly, e.g. through trade misinvoicing. Authors might choose to discuss the potential economic impact of reducing such capital losses: the impact on savings, investment, trade, interest rates, consumption, employment, economic growth, and/or culture and the arts, for example. In this context, it would be interesting to explore what policies domestic and international authorities might adopt in order to discourage the export of private sector capital and to amplify the beneficial effects of curbing illicit financial outflows. The latter exploration raises the partly moral question of how to value these effects from the standpoint of a less developed country’s poor majority.

Authors might also tackle the challenge of estimating the magnitude of such capital losses. Is some of the capital now illicitly removed brought back openly as new investment? Would some of the capital now illicitly removed be exported anyway, openly, even if there were no opportunity to shift it out in tax-dodging ways? Would some of the MNCs now illicitly shifting profits out have refrained from entering the country in the first place without the prospect of tax-dodging profits, and would such failures to enter be counterproductive to the interests of the developing countries?

The above lines of thought are meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. We hope for a creative diversity of submissions that provide a rich and well-grounded picture of what our world could look like—especially from the perspective of the poor — if illicit financial outflows from the less developed countries could be substantially curtailed.

The best entries will be presented at an international conference in the fall of 2016 at Yale University and subsequently published in a special issue of a prominent journal. In addition, at least two of the winning essays will receive a monetary award: a first prize of $5,000 and a second prize of $3,000.

Please email your entry to ian@academicsstand.org by Monday, August 29 at 5pm ET. We ask that entries be anonymized to facilitate blind refereeing. Winners will be selected by an expert jury, whose decisions are final.

Global Tax Fairness: New ASAP-Supported OUP Publication

2016-01-07 By ASAP Global

ASAP has co-funded a new Oxford University Press anthology, co-edited by ASAP Board President Thomas Pogge, and due to be published in Feb 2016: Global Tax Fairness.

Briefly, the book addresses fifteen different reform proposals that are urgently needed to correct the fault lines in the international tax system as it exists today, and which deprive both developing and developed countries of critical tax resources. It offers clear and concrete ideas on how the reforms can be achieved and why they are important for a more just and equitable global system to prevail. The policy reforms outlined in this book not only advance tax justice but also protect human rights by curtailing illegal activity and making available more resources for development.

Global Poverty Consensus Report Published

2015-10-06 By ASAP Global

The Global Poverty Consensus Report (GPCR) is a joint project between ASAP and the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP). It aims to highlight the existing academic consensus on the causes and remedies for global poverty. Based on thirty-nine interviews done by Gilad Tanay in 2012, the analysis was written by Alberto Cimadamore and Lynda Lange. The final report is now available for download. More information on the project is available here.

ASAP Writes Open Letter on Migration

2015-09-17 By ASAP Global

For Immediate Release

Academics Stand Against Poverty

London 17 September 2015: Open Letter on Migration

[Available in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Greek, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Turkish]

To add your name to the open letter, click here.

We are a global community of scholars from a range of disciplinary and geographic perspectives. We are concerned about the refugee crisis that is presently unfolding in the wider Mediterranean region and distressed by the inadequacy of official responses thus far.

To read our letter on openDemocracy, click here.

We face two urgent moral tasks: (1) to ensure the safety and well-being of those who have been forced to move; and (2) to address the systemic problems that are forcing people to migrate in the first place, so that migration will always be a choice and not a necessity. The first is most immediate, but ultimately the second is most important.

The global community’s long-term aim should be to address the patterns of violence, poverty, and uneven development that force people to leave their homes. Context matters. We must recognize that these patterns are features of an international system – of geopolitical maneuvering, resource extraction, trade and finance – largely designed by a small number of rich countries that derive great material advantage from it. It is crucial to protect the victims of this system and to work for its reform. This includes working to end resource wars, stemming illicit flows of capital out of developing countries, making trade regimes fairer, respecting national sovereignty, and responding to climate change.

The present crisis offers a monumental opportunity to turn tragedy into a positive global legacy. It was out of the chaos and mass displacement of the early 20th century that, as a global community, we created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Refugee Convention with its Protocol, and a variety of structures to ensure peace, security and justice for all. Yet today, with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimating that the number of displaced people worldwide is at an all-time high, those structures are being tested.

Now is the moment to re-assert our global commitment to peace, security and justice. This is a collective and ongoing endeavour that goes beyond the narrow territorial concerns reflected in the focus on border control. As an international community, we must find new ways to work together.

At the same time, we must uphold more immediate responsibilities. The responses of citizens and communities globally to the current mass movement have far outstripped in human compassion the responses of most governments. We call upon all governments, including European and Gulf States, but also those further afield, to offer sanctuary to those who need it. This includes swift access to humanitarian protection (including support to those crossing the Mediterranean); opportunities for work and livelihood; and the registration of children born to displaced families. We urge national and international bodies to prioritise additional funding for refugees (that does not deplete existing aid or climate change commitments); and to ensure that efforts to ‘fight trafficking’ do not become an attempt to prevent migration.

Closing borders to stop people moving is not a solution. Research shows clearly that blocking individuals at points along their journey pushes them to find new migration strategies, which only makes their situation more precarious.

We need a political commitment from regional and international entities to work together. For example, we urge European states to redouble efforts to build a genuinely humanitarian European-wide response, and to provide resources and mandate to EU institutions to coordinate a truly effective response: to both protect those migrating today and to stop the likelihood of such movement in the future. A global response that addresses the systemic drivers of mass displacement (including conflict, uneven development, generalised violence and persecution of minorities) has the potential to create a positive global legacy in response to the biggest migration challenge of the twenty-first century.

Signed,

Thomas Pogge, Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy, Yale University, USA

Tendayi Bloom, Global Justice Program Fellow, Yale University, USA

Cat Tully, Strategy & Security Insitute, Exeter University, United Kingdom

Katie Tonkiss, Lecturer in Sociology and Policy, Aston University, United Kingdom

Feargal Cochrane, Director of the Conflict Analysis Research Centre, University of Kent, United Kingdom

Jeremie Nare, Chargé de Programmes, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Mitu Sengupta, Associate Professor of Politics, Ryerson University, Canada

David Álvarez, Sociology Department Faculty, Universidade of Vigo, Spain

Txetxu Ausín, Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, CSIC, Spain

Mladjo Ivanovic and Dr. Anna Malavisi, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, USA

Gabriel Amitsis, Associate Professor of Social Security Law, Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Greece

Robert Lepenies, ASAP Global Colleagues Program Manager and Post-Doctoral Fellow, European University Institute, Italy

Henrieke Max, ASAP Global Colleagues Management Team Member, Germany

Ruth Blackshaw, ASAP Global Colleagues Management Team Member, USA

Luis Cabrera, Associate Professor at the School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University, Australia

Ashok Acharya, Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, India

Paula Casal, Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

David Rodríguez-Arias, Ramón y Cajal Researcher, University of Granada, Spain

Carissa Véliz, DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford, UK

Jason Hickel, Postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at the London School of Economics, United Kingdom

Keith Horton, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wollongong, Australia

Helen Yanacopulos, Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Development, The Open University, United Kingdom

Mitu Sengupta, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University in Toronto and Global Coordinator at the Centre for Development and Human Rights in Delhi, India

Zorka Millin, Senior Legal Advisor for Global Witness, USA

Matthew Lindauer, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University, Australia

Thana Campos, Research Associate, Von Hugel Institute, St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, UK

Ellen Szarleta, Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Excellence and Associate Professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Northwest, USA

Henning Hahn, Academics Stand Against Poverty, Germany

Diane Velica, Academics Stand Against Poverty, Romania

Nicole Selame, Academics Stand Against Poverty, Chile

Gottfried Schweiger, Academics Stand Against Poverty, Austria

Oluwaseun Olanrewaju, Doctoral Candidate, Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Switzerland.

Nita Mishra, Doctoral Candidate, University College Cork, Ireland

Maria João Cabrita, Researcher at the Political Theory Group, Universidade do Minho (Portugal)

Rachel Payne, ASAP Global Coordinator, USA

Chelsea Papa, ASAP Program Manager, USA

The letter has also been signed by the ASAP Global Board and chapters/associate chapters in Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Oceania, Portugal, Romania, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, and West Africa, as well as members of the ASAP Global Colleagues Program.

You can add your name to the above open letter here.

Media Contact: Chelsea Papa, chelsea@academicsstand.org

If you would like to translate this letter into your own language, or you have shared this letter on another online platform, please e-mail us at chelsea@academicsstand.org and we will add the links to this page.

Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) is an international association focused on helping researchers and teachers enhance their impact on poverty. ASAP’s overarching aims are to contribute to the eradication of severe poverty worldwide and to help ensure that poverty policy and development efforts are guided by rigorous empirical and normative scholarship. ASAP recognises that poverty is a process, not a static given. It seeks to address the root drivers of impoverishment in both the global and domestic spheres and to highlight how some of the factors can worsen poverty in both affluent and less-affluent countries. ASAP’s theory of social change focuses on both institutions and norms. Inspired by how engaged academics helped transform views on civil rights, the US war in Vietnam, apartheid and lately gender inequality and violence, ASAP holds that we can help achieve a decisive shift of views on poverty and poor people worldwide.

The State of Food Insecurity Report Hides the Extent of Global Hunger

2015-06-09 By ASAP Global

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By Thomas Pogge

Each year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published a State of Food Insecurity (SOFI) report. The 2015 report has just come out. In an accompanying letter, the FAO’s Coordinator for Economic and Social Development, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, summarizes its message as follows: “With the number of chronically hungry people in developing countries declining from 990.7 million in 1991 to 779.9 million in 2014, their share in developing countries has declined by 44.4 per cent, from 23.4 to 12.9 per cent over the 23 years, but still short of the 11.7 per cent target.” We may not quite achieve the halving of chronic undernourishment envisaged in the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG-1), but we will get quite close.

Before we celebrate, let us remember the following facts. The initial version of the promise to halve chronic undernourishment by 2015 was made at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome and envisioned halving the number of chronically undernourished peopled between 1996 and 2015. The UN General Assembly’s Millennium Declaration then diluted this goal by promising to halve the proportion of chronically undernourished people in the world’s population between 2000 and 2015. And MDG-1 diluted the goal once more by promising to halve the proportion of chronically undernourished people in the population of the developing countries between 1990 and 2015. Had we stuck to the original World Food Summit interpretation of what it means to halve chronic undernourishment by 2015, then we would find a reduction of less than 15 percent: from 931 million in 1996 to 795 million in 2014.

Even this distinctly modest progress is due entirely to the FAO’s abrupt change of methodology announced in its 2012 SOFI report. Here are the official FAO numbers of chronically undernourished – in millions – according to the old and new methodologies side by side:

YEAR	OLD	NEW
1990	843	1010
1996	788	931
2001	833	922
2006	848	884
2008	963	867
2009	1023	867
2010	925	868
2014		795

Of course, it is very bad practice to make so dramatic a change in methodology, with the benefit of hindsight, in the 22^nd year of a 25-year measurement exercise. Moreover, it is entirely incredible that undernourishment should have remained constant while food prices near-doubled from 2005 toward twin peaks in 2008 and 2011 (source). Finally, the new definition of undernourishment (see p. 50 of the 2012 SOFI) is simply absurd. A person is counted as undernourished only if her or his

(a) “food energy availability [no other nutrient deficiencies count]

(b) is inadequate to cover even minimum needs for a sedentary lifestyle”

This fails to count all the people who are seriously short of vitamins (e.g. A), minerals (e.g. iron), proteins or any other crucial nutrients. It fails to count all those who must do hard physical labor for a living and thus need more than the 1800 kcal allocated for a sedentary lifestyle. And it fails to count all those who are desperately hungry for months but not for more than a year. To take in the full absurdity of this definition, realize that, according to it, an undernourished rickshaw driver is a biological impossibility because, if such a person were to fall below the calorie intake needed for a sedentary lifestyle, he would be dead long before the year is up and thus never appear in the FAO’s statistics. (A rickshaw driver needs 3000-4000 kcals per day.)

The FAO’s new methodology vastly understates the number of chronically undernourished, and this huge undercount then also produces a much-too-rosy trend picture. (Note that there were various important changes in definitions and methods during the Millennium Development Goal period and, after every change, the trend figures improved. Surely no coincidence!)

The 2015 SOFI (p. 52) explicitly defends the new methodology against two criticisms made by myself and others – e.g., in Frances Moore Lappé, Jennifer Clapp, Molly Anderson, Robin Broad, Ellen Messer, Thomas Pogge and Timothy Wise, “How We Count Hunger Matters,” Ethics & International Affairs, 27/3 (2013), pp. 251–259.

(1) “At the moment, few surveys accurately capture habitual food consumption at the individual level and collect sufficient information on the anthropometric characteristics and activity levels of each surveyed individual; in other words, very few surveys would allow for an estimation of the relevant energy requirement threshold at the individual level.” – My response: So do some surveys instead of repeating your flawed exercise! Even just a random sample of a few thousand people would give you a sense of the quality (or lack thereof) of your estimates for some country or province. It is a scandal that world hunger is estimated in the primitive way that it is, that we don’t even know, roughly, how many chronically undernourished people there are.

(2) “Within the population, there is a range of values for energy requirements that are compatible with healthy status, given that body weight, metabolic efficiency and physical activity levels vary. It follows [!] that only values below the minimum of such a range can be associated with undernourishment, in a probabilistic sense. Hence, for the PoU [prevalence of undernourishment] to indicate that a randomly selected individual in a population is undernourished, the appropriate threshold is the lower end of the range of energy requirements.” – My response: this is gibberish. What really follows is that one has to use the minimum of the range if one wants to be absolutely certain of never counting as undernourished anyone who is not. But this certainty – given the FAO method – comes at the cost of not counting hundreds of millions of people who have enough calories for a sedentary lifestyle with low body weight and high metabolic efficiency but do not have enough calories for their actual work load, actual body weight and actual metabolism. This comes on top of ignoring (not counting) all those who are short of nutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.) other than energy. Think of all the millions suffering from iron-deficiency anemia – are they not undernourished and chronically so?

The FAO’s new methodology was brought in before Jomo Kwame Sundaram joined the FAO and, in any case, my critique is not directed at the officials of the FAO. Their decisions may well be driven by the best intentions. Like with other UN agencies, the top officers of the FAO serve at the pleasure of politicians and get FAO’s funding from politicians; and, in order to get more support toward pursuing the FAO’s noble goals, they may have to help politicians defend their policies and in particular their grand globalization project. If I were an FAO official, perhaps I would give politicians nicer-looking numbers and trend figures in exchange for greater support for FAO’s work. But someone, somewhere, also needs to speak the truth, needs to say that the poor have been dramatically betrayed, that undernourishment is vastly more common and persistent than the FAO statistics claim, that there ought to be an independent group of academic experts producing sound alternative estimates. It is our responsibility as world citizens to relieve the FAO’s dreadful conflict of interest and our responsibility as academics to develop reliable estimates even if governments obstruct any such effort. We can do this job, and we should join forces to do so!

Photo by Zoriah

Call for Papers: Third Annual Amartya Sen Prize Competition

Global Tax Fairness: New ASAP-Supported OUP Publication

Global Poverty Consensus Report Published

ASAP Writes Open Letter on Migration

For Immediate Release

The State of Food Insecurity Report Hides the Extent of Global Hunger

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