The Plan for a J-Curve Transition

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-27
Author(s):  
Kristen Ghodsee ◽  
Mitchell A. Orenstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Market Mechanisms ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
J Curve ◽  
Mass Privatization ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

Chapter 1 shows how economic reforms advocated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)—the international financial institutions that oversaw transition—planned for the construction of free market systems across the postsocialist world. It shows they relied heavily on reforms designed for Latin America after the debt crisis of the 1980s, placing great faith in market mechanisms and underestimating the postcommunist social context. The most innovative reform, mass privatization, enabled corrupt institutions and individuals to act as predators in asymmetric exchanges. While policymakers planned to mitigate the impacts of neoliberal reforms on the poor through targeted social policies, reforms created an economic and social order based on widespread inequality.

Failing forward: A case study in neoliberalism and abandonment in Calama

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 235-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Babidge ◽  
Madeleine Belfrage
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
World Bank ◽  
International Monetary Fund ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Mining City ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

Neoliberalism’s failings as a social order are a commonplace in the critical social sciences, and lately such critique has even been ventured from within the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. How has such a problematic form of capitalism both sustained criticism and flourished? Chilean neoliberalism might tell us something of how neoliberal forms weather critique to sustain elite power and significant social inequality, that is, how neoliberalism ‘fails forward’? We examine a case study in the Chilean mining city of Calama where a series of communal strikes and the authorities’ response demonstrate the resilience of neoliberalism and its significant failures that citizens experience as abandonment.

The World Bank, the Monetary Fund, and Poverty

1994 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 567-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horst Brand
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
World Bank ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
International Financial Institutions ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

The debt crisis into which heavy borrowing, steeply rising interest rates, and a worldwide recession had plunged a number of developing countries in the late 1970s and 1980s was alleviated largely by policies and conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These policies and conditions were meant to strengthen the export and financial markets of those countries, stabilize their currencies, and reduce the reach of their governments in their economies. However, they contributed to deepening poverty and structural crises, as the reports and data published by the international financial institutions themselves attest.

Where is the Third World now?

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 225-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE THOMAS
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Third World ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
Environment And Development ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

As we enter the new millennium, the Third World, far from disappearing, is becoming global. The dynamic of economic driven globalization is resulting in the global reproduction of Third World problems. Growing inequality, risk and vulnerability characterize not simply the state system, but an emerging global social order. This is part of an historical process underway for five centuries: the expansion of capitalism across the globe. Technological developments speed up the process. The demise of the communist bloc and the associated rejection of ‘real existing socialism’ as a mode of economic organization have provided a specific additional fillip to the reconfiguration of the ‘Third World’. The 1980s, and more particularly the 1990s, have witnessed the mainstreaming of liberal economic ideology via the Washington consensus. This approach to development has been legitimated in several global conferences such as United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) and the Copenhagen Social Summit. It has been applied practically through institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO). In its wake we have seen a deepening of existing inequalities between and within states, with a resulting tension—contradiction even—between the development targets agreed by the United Nations (UN), and the policies pursued by international organizations and governments to facilitate such results.

Africa: Dead Aid and the return of neoliberalism

Race & Class ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hilary
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
International Monetary Fund ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Real ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World ◽  
Aid Dependency ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

Dambisa Moyo’s 2009 book Dead Aid sought to revive the neoliberal prescriptions for Africa’s development that were promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund during the 1980s and 1990s. This article argues that implementing such prescriptions would repeat the catastrophic errors of Africa’s two ‘lost decades’ and that the real alternative to aid dependency lies not in the free market but in development that is genuinely accountable to local communities.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

scholarly journals The Entrepreneur in “Transformation Cinema”: Representing the Economic Changes of the 1990s in Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542098015
Author(s):  
Veronika Pehe
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Economic Expectations

This article analyses how economic change after 1989 was perceived and rooted in society through cultural representations, specifically in the film production of Poland and Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic and Slovakia). The starting premise of this investigation is that popular commercial films, alongside the media and discourse of politicians and other key actors of the systemic transformation, also informed ideas about the free market circulating in the public sphere. Filmmakers, faced with the new realities brought about initially by the gradual liberalization of the economy in the late 1980s and later the systemic change of the economic transformation in both countries, immediately turned to capturing and fictionalizing the changes surrounding them. They presented audiences with role models of what it means to be a capitalist, but also tales of warning. This article investigates the “transformation cinema” of the 1990s, focusing on the figure of the entrepreneur and private enterprise. It examines how filmmakers searched for a visual language to critique or affirm the new social order, but also continued to work with inherited modes from the late socialist era. The article asserts that while the economic expectations conveyed through cinema focused largely on structuring the imagination of a new middle class in Poland, Czech(oslovak) cinema adopted a more sceptical outlook, suggesting that the promises of the free market were not available to “ordinary” working people.

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