News stories by Jomo Kwame Sundaram, page 32

BHUBANESWAR, India and KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 26 (IPS) - Do politicians' words matter? Since becoming US President, Donald J Trump has dismissed his opponents and others he does not like as evil, stupid or both. He has referred to undocumented immigrants as animals, and to poor countries as shitholes.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Feb 19 (IPS) - For two centuries, all too many discussions about hunger and resource scarcity has been haunted by the ghost of Parson Thomas Malthus. Malthus warned that rising populations would exhaust resources, especially those needed for food production. Exponential population growth would outstrip food output.

KUALA LUMPUR and BERLIN, Feb 12 (IPS) - Economic recovery efforts since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis have mainly depended on unconventional monetary policies. As fears rise of yet another international financial crisis, there are growing concerns about the increased possibility of large-scale military conflict.

GENEVA and KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 05 (IPS) - In Davos in late January, several powerful governments and their allies announced their intention to launch new negotiations on e-commerce. Unusually, the intention is to launch the plurilateral negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO), an ostensibly multilateral organization, setting problematic precedents for the future of multilateral negotiations.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 29 (IPS) - Owing to our varied circumstances and experiences, there are contradictory tendencies to either exaggerate or underestimate the power and importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in contemporary society.

SYDNEY & KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 22 (IPS) - Despite all the evidence to the contrary, and substantial opposition from community groups, public-private partnerships (PPPs) are still being promoted to deliver sustainable development.

Public-private hospital partnerships are supposed to ensure that the private sector will offer much needed efficiency in healthcare provision.

SYDNEY & KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 15 (IPS) - In light of the uncertainty caused by the US-China trade war, the IMF expects the US economic growth to slow from a three-year high of 2.9 per cent in 2018 to 2.5 per cent in 2019, while China's expansion has already slowed in recent years, albeit from much higher levels.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 08 (IPS) - After US President Donald Trump withdrew from Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), involving twelve countries on the Pacific rim, on his first day in office, Japan, Australia and their closest allies proposed and promoted the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) to draw the US back into the region to counter China's fast-growing power and influence.

KUALA LUMPUR & SYDNEY, Dec 18 (IPS) - The notion of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later, South Africa) was concocted by Goldman Sachs' Jim O'Neill. His 2001 acronym was initially seen as a timely, if not belated acknowledgement of the rise of the South.

But if one takes China out of the BRICS, one is left with little more than RIBS. While the RIBS have undoubtedly grown in recent decades, their expansion has been quite uneven and much more modest than China's, while the post-Soviet Russian economy contracted by half during Boris Yeltsin's first three years of ‘shock therapy' during 1992-1994.

KUALA LUMPUR & SYDNEY, Dec 11 (IPS) - Over the last two decades since the Global Compact, the United Nations has increasingly embraced the corporate sector, most recently to raise finance needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), i.e., for Agenda 2030. But growing big business influence has also compromised analyses, recommendations, policies and programme implementation, undermining the SDGs.