A Discussion on UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Report 2020

UNCTAD's Trade and Development Report 2020

From global pandemic to prosperity for all: avoiding another lost decade

In this seminar, we will discuss the impact of the current policies on the World’s regions and a number of possible policy scenarios from this year’s Trade and Development Report of UNCTAD. Conventional economics, rules, and guidelines drove governments to an abrupt return to austerity in 2010, condemning a world still reeling from the Global Financial Crisis to a decade of sluggish growth and growing economic insecurity. Now history risks repeating itself. As the Covid-19 relief measures persist, the world economy needs a more concerted programme for durable recovery to take hold.

As the world recognizes that monetary policy alone cannot bring the economy back on its feet, economists and policy-makers must overcome taboos on fiscal policy. The UNCTAD report recognises the role of aggregate demand as a driver of employment and growth, but also insists that that the state must play a transformative role, particularly in developing countries, if the interconnected challenges of economic development, environmental recovery and social justice are to be effectively addressed. This suggests reexamining the roles of public institutions at both the national and international levels in guiding the transition to a fair and green future.

Speakers

Richard Kozul-Wright
Dr. Richard Kozul-Wright is the Director of the Globalization and Development Strategies Division in UNCTAD. He has worked at the United Nations in both New York and Geneva. Dr. Kozul-Wright has published widely on economic issues including, inter alia, in the Economic Journal, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, The Journal of Development Studies, and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. His latest book is the Resistible Rise of Market Fundamentalism (with Paul Rayment) and he has also edited volumes on Transnational Corporations and the Global Economy, Economic Insecurity and Development, Securing Peace, and Climate Protection and Development. Dr. Kozul-Wright holds a Ph.D in Economics from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Jeronim Capaldo
Dr. Jeronim Capaldo is an economist in UNCTAD’s Division on Globalization. His research focuses on macroeconomics applied to global issues, most recently to linkages between distribution, trade and development. Jeronim is also a Senior Scholar at Boston University and serves as Co-editor in Chief of the Journal of Globalization and Development. He holds a PhD in economics from the New School for Social Research.

Dicussants

Claudia Fontanari
Dr. Claudia Fontanari is a post-doctoral research fellow in economics at Roma Tre University, where she obtained her PhD in 2017 with a dissertation on the notion and measures of labor productivity. She has been visiting researcher during her PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Since 2017, she has been teaching assistant in the course of Macroeconomics at Roma Tre University. Her main research interests are in the fields of applied macroeconomics and economic policies with a focus on output and employment determination from a demand-led growth perspective, income distribution, and the labor market.

Devika Dutt
Devika Dutt a Doctoral Candidate in Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with a specialization in International Finance, Macroeconomics, Political Economy, and Development. My research is focused on the political economy of of foreign exchange intervention, central bank swap agreements, the political economy of development policy (especially as it relates to international financial institutions), and macroeconomic policy in developing economies. I am also a member of the Steering Group and a co-Founder of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ)

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