Featured image for “UK Budget 2023: What the Big Red Box leaves out ”

UK Budget 2023: What the Big Red Box leaves out 

March 16, 2023
British (or British adjacent) readers will by now probably have digested the main headlines of yesterday’s budget, but Katy Chakrabortty digs deeper in this guest post. Since election manifestos tend to appear only twice a decade, party leadership pledges can be made in TV debates and quietly forgotten and the King’s Speech is delivered with an air of regal deference,
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Featured image for “Bread and roses – why Oxfam is shining a light on feminist movements this March”

Bread and roses – why Oxfam is shining a light on feminist movements this March

March 8, 2023
Victoria Stetsko introduces Oxfam’s “Feminist Power” campaign for International Women’s Day, where it will be celebrating organisations across the globe fighting for rights and respect for women and queer people “Hearts starve as well as bodies: give us bread, but give us roses,” sang striking women workers in the early 20th century United States. That movement’s famous demand for “Bread
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The Global role of Grandmothers in the Care Economy

February 1, 2023
In recent years, Oxfam’s been doing some pioneering work on the ‘care economy’, aka the bit Adam Smith left out (example here and here). My uninformed mental image of this had been all about the role of parents, generally mothers, in running the household and bringing up the kids, so I was struck by a recent Economist piece on the
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Ending Fossil Fuel Subsidies: the politics of saving the planet

January 17, 2023
Neil McCulloch introduces his new book Hands up if you would like petrol prices to go up?  I’m guessing not too many hands.  The cripplingly high costs of energy (whether petrol, diesel, gas or coal as well as electricity) have posed a huge challenge for households and firms all around the world.  Massive increases in these costs, driven by the
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Featured image for “Taxation of the World’s Super-Rich has collapsed: as 1 in 8 people go to bed hungry, that has to change”

Taxation of the World’s Super-Rich has collapsed: as 1 in 8 people go to bed hungry, that has to change

January 16, 2023
Max Lawson introduces Oxfam’s 2023 Davos report, ‘Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality’ Walter is the father of my son’s best friend at school. He works nights as a security guard at a bank in the City of London. He has three kids. They are really struggling, as the prices of everything
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Loss and Damage fund established at COP27: what happens next?

November 29, 2022
Saleemul Huq, one of the most persistent long-term advocates of a ‘loss and damage’ fund on climate change, explores the origins and potential of the breakthrough at the recent COP. For thirty years the vulnerable developing countries led by the small island states had been demanding under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) the creation of a fund
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Austerity as Gender-Based Violence

November 26, 2022
To mark this year’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, Oxfam’s Dana Abed introduces its new report: The Assault of Austerity: How prevailing economic policy choices are a form of gender-based violence, (here’s the online summary with graphics).This post first appeared on Oxfam’s Views and Voices blog Feminist economists have warned for years that the global economic system is violent
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Featured image for “Ha-Joon Chang on Economics v Science Fiction and other great ways to end your weeks this autumn – the LSE’s Cutting Edge lectures are back”

Ha-Joon Chang on Economics v Science Fiction and other great ways to end your weeks this autumn – the LSE’s Cutting Edge lectures are back

October 6, 2022
Ha-Joon Chang on Economics v Science Fiction, and other great ways to end your weeks this autumn – the LSE’s Cutting Edge lectures are back Heads up for this year’s LSE ‘Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice’ lecture series, which kicks off next Friday (14th October). We’re moving into hybrid mode this year, with a mix of online
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Book Review: Gambling on Development, by Stefan Dercon

August 30, 2022
Ah the summer reading backlog. A hammock, sunshine (lots of it) and some good books. Top of my reviews list this year was Gambling on Development: Why Some Countries Win and Others Lose, by Stefan Dercon. He summarized his book on this blog back in May, but I wanted to read (and review) it for myself. Dercon is a big
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Hopelessness?

July 20, 2022
I’m a huge fan of Branko Milanovic’s writing. In both books and blog he is consistently original, erudite and thought-provoking. A genuine old-school European intellectual. Here’s the latest post on his Global Inequality blog. That today’s world situation is the worst since the end of the Second World War is not an excessive, nor original, statement. As we teeter on
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Featured image for “Africa is so rich in farmland – so why is it still hungry?”

Africa is so rich in farmland – so why is it still hungry?

July 13, 2022
Guest post from Oxfam’s Anthony Kamande and Dailes Judge, ahead of this week’s African Union meeting It’s been more than two months since it rained in Nakuru County, Kenya, and Jane’s bean crop is long gone. Her only hope on her small plot of 0.8 hectares is the maize crop – but it will also be gone if it doesn’t
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Featured image for “Starving civilians is an ancient military tactic, but today it’s a war crime in Ukraine, Yemen, Tigray and elsewhere”

Starving civilians is an ancient military tactic, but today it’s a war crime in Ukraine, Yemen, Tigray and elsewhere

July 5, 2022
Aid organizations, including Oxfam, where I work part time, have been trying to draw attention to the looming hunger crisis across much of Sub-Saharan Africa. But some have been criticised for portraying the causes as mainly about drought, when in fact, war and conflict in countries such as Somalia and Ethiopia have been crucial factors. So I’m reposting this excellent
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