Financing the future we want – from a green recovery to a just transition
COVID-19 has plunged much of the world into the biggest recession in over a century with devastating impacts for developing countries with little resources to combat a pandemic on this scale. As all sectors of the economy shrink (production, manufacturing, trade, services, sales), there has been a revival of the politics of austerity so prevalent after the 2008 economic crisis. Even without its neoliberal advocates, local to national governments everywhere are already making cuts in critical services as their tax base and income shrinks.
And the situation is even worse in countries in the South already facing high debt obligations. Not only will austerity worsen the crisis for ordinary people, its timing couldn’t be worse as the climate emergency demands a massive and urgent investment in transforming all economies away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable regenerative economies. What options and mechanisms do we have in the current circumstances to avoid austerity and invest in a just transition? How can we ensure that the Global South benefits? How can we change the narrative to stop an unfolding crisis become a deepening emergency?
Panellists:
- Professor Jayati Ghosh, award-winning economist Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Author of India and the International Economy (2015) and co-editor of Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development (2018).
- Ann Pettifor, political economist, director of PRIME (Policy Research in Macroeconomics and author of The Production of Money (2017)
- Oscar Reyes, Associate Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies and author of Change Finance, not the Climate (2020)
- Alvin Mosioma is the founding Executive Director of Tax Justice Network Africa, an Advocacy and Research Network in 16 African countries working on Tax Justice and curbing of illicit financial flows from Africa