TALKRe-emergent Debt Crises in Developing Countries
Date: June 3 (Sat.), 2023
Time: 14:00-16:30
Venue: Doshisha University, Imadegawa Campus, Ryoshinkan RY 305 (in person)
Speaker: Walden Bello（Focus on the Global South）
Organizer: Research group "Capitalism/Democracy" under Global Mediterranean project
Coorganizer: Global Justice Research Group
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Friday - April 14, 2023 Washington DC. World Bank Group/International Monetary Fund 2023 Spring meetings. © 2023 The World Bank Group (No change has been made)
OUTLINE
Currently, the debt crises in developing countries are showing signs of re-emerging. The chain of defaults has expanded from Argentina in May 2020 to Zambia in Africa, Suriname in South America, Lebanon in the Middle East, and Sri Lanka in South Asia. According to World Bank statistics, 53 countries are currently at danger levels, raising fears of another global debt crisis.
Why are these countries facing financial collapse all at once? Since the financial crisis of 2008, central banks of major countries have been trying to stimulate economic recovery through zero interest rates and quantitative easing, but the majority of the funds have been used as speculative money to flood the financial markets and buy stocks, real estate, and government bonds. However, when the global economy slowed down due to the Covid pandemic and interest rates were eventually raised to counter inflation, developing countries with ballooning external debt once again fell into the “debt trap”.
Why are financial crises repeated? In this lecture, we will consider the contradictions of IMF-led globalization and how to overcome them with Walden Bellow, who has worked on Third World debt issues for many years as co-chair of FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH, based in Manila and Bangkok.
BIO
Walden Bello is a sociologist and human rights activist in the Philippines. He has been working as a co-chair of FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH. Bello is currently visiting professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton and visiting scholar at the Institute of Southeast Asian Area Studies, Kyoto University.
He graduated from Ateneo College in Manila in 1966 and received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 1975. In 2003, he was awarded RIGHT LIVELIHOOD AWARD, which is called as “another Nobel Prize”, in Stockholm.
His recent publications include Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2019), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/Zed, 2019), Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013), The Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009), Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis (London: Penguin, 1990).
CONTACT
Keisuke Kikuchi (Graduate School of Global Studies at Doshisha University）
kkikuchi@mail.doshisha.ac.jp