2023 was billed as the moment in which the leaders of world came to terms with the scale of financing necessary for sustainable development. For the last several years, world leaders have made big promises and laid out bold plans to mitigate the climate crisis and help poor countries adapt. They pledged that the World Bank would transform itself to work on climate change, and that the multilateral system would get new money and lend more aggressively with the resources it has, including to meet concessional needs. An agreement between creditors would provide debt relief to countries that most needed it. And where public money was insufficient, the multilateral system would be able to catalyze private investment in developing countries.
I dispute that it represents failure. My conclusion is worse than that -- the system is working precisely the way it was designed, because the colonialism and exploitation of the periphery never went away ...
i worked in washington in the development finance world in the late 70s but left the field after that. so for me the long run has arrived -- its 45 years since i was involved and it looks like really nothing has changed or really been accomplished. Development and not sustainability require domestic institution building first and capital second. that never happened and so we continue to have the imf and mdbs as perpetual motion machines whirling about in their own world and private capital interested in only returns now. For gods sake, look at the thames water disaster and the asset stripping going on in the us in the senior health care living sector (which i am involved with now). If the uk cant adequately manage private investment, how do you expect Ethiopia to do so?
So much talk but no meaningful progress - and a currently deteriorating situation. Why? With the world on track for somewhere around 3C of heating we are faced with a situation where the sustainable population will dramatically fall.If population maxes out at ca. 10 Billion then we can only feed everyone with dramatically new technology - technically conceivable but nowhere even at the planning stage. If we continue on this path then we will only be able to support somewhere between 1-3 Billion.
We all know that the situation needs immediate, concerted and unrelenting action. Waiting for the natural development of renewables to overturn our fossil fuel economies simply does not cut it.
The world is not run by fools. Those clever enough to make all that money are surely smart enough to grasp what is happening.
My opinion: they do know. They don't care. The real plan is: Let The Poor Die.
The problem is not mainly economic, but political. Looking at the countries suffering the biggest capital outflows, it's obvious that those places are suffering from such awful governance , or no government at all, that any money invested there would simply be wasted or stolen. Sudan, Yemen, Haiti or Somalia can't be helped by throwing money at them. As long as a large part of the developing world is simply very inhospitable to foreign investment, it's no wonder private investors are not so keen.
First principles…the West allocates most capital on price. Its predominant economy, after clear legislative education on carbon beginning in 1988, does not price carbon nationally. Even the 2005 implementation of US invented cap & trade by its comparable, the EU, did not alter this. Markets have worked for the US - which is 64% of MSCI global market capitalization as of the end of March, for 4% of population. Bottom line: if the US will not price carbon - expecting massive American capital flows of any type for EMDC mitigation or adaptation is unrealistic. Houston we have a problem.
A brilliant, powerful piece. To this point the range of analyses and reports have not moved opinion enough where it needs to move, in the capitals of the G7. We all need to drive change. Your scholarship and advocacy helps. Bob Rae
Mike Davis' ""Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World" comes back to haunt us in modern terms. A perpetual cycle of evil.
This grief at the global level further justifies the rage coming through the Substack platform from independent scientists, medical doctors, journalists and readers over the mismanagement of Covid19 as well as a creeping rage over coverups of corruption in the spaces where profiteering and medicine meet.
It took 10 years to recover from the 2008 crisis. We don't have another 10 years before the next pandemic. In the meantime, people who are paying attention to independent reporters are associating govt media censorship with populism, nationalism, and mad conspiracies by global elites. The will to help the drowning poor nations is not in the general public and apparently the economists have not been able to birth something new out of the human condition.
I heartily agree that no one wants to really pour money into Somalia, Haiti etc any more than Americans want to continue to bleed more into the inner city Welfare trap.
I have a feeling that somehow stopping the profiteering of the US War Machine, which set the stage for the war in Ukraine, and wasted 20 years of blood and treasure in the Middle East would be a good place to start just doing the right thing. And then the world needs nuclear energy, not nuclear bombs. Doing the right thing in tangible ways might help more than trying to manipulate ephemeral capital flows.
Bottom line: in the U.S., the average citizen is really really angry and succumbing to despair, rage and mental illness. They don't care about sinking nations. They feel powerless and hopeless about climate change. This too may also have something to do with capital flows especially in a fake economy that stands upon high finance wizardry.
Anyway... thank you for shining light upon urgent global issues and the sending out a clarion call. "Late Victorian Holicausts... " should be required reading for grownups. It is the book that makes grown men cry.
“This is the reality that the powers that be want to “reform”. One might say it needs more than reform.”
Fidel Castro did the math 50 years ago: whether the terms are concessional or non-concessional, the debt is unpayable, and it is morally monstrous to attempt to collect it.
I’m more interested in what gives Schwab and the WEF its influence in proposing such issues that require solutions? Who’s the real fool — WEF or the corporations funding such proposals?
“This combination of flows should rob of us of any illusions about the actual operation of public-private development finance when it comes under short-term stress. The idea of so-called “blended development finance” is that modest amounts of public funds will be intelligently leveraged to generated larger private flows. What happened in 2023 was the reverse. With private funding accelerating its retreat from 2022 to 2023, non-concessional development funding was procylical. Far from increasing it not only decreased, but became net negative. And though concessional funding, to the poorest most-stressed borrowers, increased, it did so to a minuscule degree and was entirely powerless to off-set the overall rebalancing.”
The problem lies in the very framing of blended finance by the originators of this term. Traditional definitions of blended finance offered by OECD, IFC and Convergence are problematic as they focus too narrowly on public sources of finance and only only on financial capital.
I dispute that it represents failure. My conclusion is worse than that -- the system is working precisely the way it was designed, because the colonialism and exploitation of the periphery never went away ...
i worked in washington in the development finance world in the late 70s but left the field after that. so for me the long run has arrived -- its 45 years since i was involved and it looks like really nothing has changed or really been accomplished. Development and not sustainability require domestic institution building first and capital second. that never happened and so we continue to have the imf and mdbs as perpetual motion machines whirling about in their own world and private capital interested in only returns now. For gods sake, look at the thames water disaster and the asset stripping going on in the us in the senior health care living sector (which i am involved with now). If the uk cant adequately manage private investment, how do you expect Ethiopia to do so?
So much talk but no meaningful progress - and a currently deteriorating situation. Why? With the world on track for somewhere around 3C of heating we are faced with a situation where the sustainable population will dramatically fall.If population maxes out at ca. 10 Billion then we can only feed everyone with dramatically new technology - technically conceivable but nowhere even at the planning stage. If we continue on this path then we will only be able to support somewhere between 1-3 Billion.
We all know that the situation needs immediate, concerted and unrelenting action. Waiting for the natural development of renewables to overturn our fossil fuel economies simply does not cut it.
The world is not run by fools. Those clever enough to make all that money are surely smart enough to grasp what is happening.
My opinion: they do know. They don't care. The real plan is: Let The Poor Die.
The problem is not mainly economic, but political. Looking at the countries suffering the biggest capital outflows, it's obvious that those places are suffering from such awful governance , or no government at all, that any money invested there would simply be wasted or stolen. Sudan, Yemen, Haiti or Somalia can't be helped by throwing money at them. As long as a large part of the developing world is simply very inhospitable to foreign investment, it's no wonder private investors are not so keen.
First principles…the West allocates most capital on price. Its predominant economy, after clear legislative education on carbon beginning in 1988, does not price carbon nationally. Even the 2005 implementation of US invented cap & trade by its comparable, the EU, did not alter this. Markets have worked for the US - which is 64% of MSCI global market capitalization as of the end of March, for 4% of population. Bottom line: if the US will not price carbon - expecting massive American capital flows of any type for EMDC mitigation or adaptation is unrealistic. Houston we have a problem.
A brilliant, powerful piece. To this point the range of analyses and reports have not moved opinion enough where it needs to move, in the capitals of the G7. We all need to drive change. Your scholarship and advocacy helps. Bob Rae
Mike Davis' ""Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World" comes back to haunt us in modern terms. A perpetual cycle of evil.
This grief at the global level further justifies the rage coming through the Substack platform from independent scientists, medical doctors, journalists and readers over the mismanagement of Covid19 as well as a creeping rage over coverups of corruption in the spaces where profiteering and medicine meet.
It took 10 years to recover from the 2008 crisis. We don't have another 10 years before the next pandemic. In the meantime, people who are paying attention to independent reporters are associating govt media censorship with populism, nationalism, and mad conspiracies by global elites. The will to help the drowning poor nations is not in the general public and apparently the economists have not been able to birth something new out of the human condition.
I heartily agree that no one wants to really pour money into Somalia, Haiti etc any more than Americans want to continue to bleed more into the inner city Welfare trap.
I have a feeling that somehow stopping the profiteering of the US War Machine, which set the stage for the war in Ukraine, and wasted 20 years of blood and treasure in the Middle East would be a good place to start just doing the right thing. And then the world needs nuclear energy, not nuclear bombs. Doing the right thing in tangible ways might help more than trying to manipulate ephemeral capital flows.
Bottom line: in the U.S., the average citizen is really really angry and succumbing to despair, rage and mental illness. They don't care about sinking nations. They feel powerless and hopeless about climate change. This too may also have something to do with capital flows especially in a fake economy that stands upon high finance wizardry.
Anyway... thank you for shining light upon urgent global issues and the sending out a clarion call. "Late Victorian Holicausts... " should be required reading for grownups. It is the book that makes grown men cry.
"The ‘financing gap’, and efforts to resolve it by escorting capital into Development are best
seen as the product of a conjuncture in which intensifying and interconnected tendencies
towards over- accumulation in a few core markets and deprivation and underdevelopment in
much of the global south increasingly threaten both the social legitimacy and the ecological
and material durability of global capitalism." (Bernards, 2023, p. 12)
“This is the reality that the powers that be want to “reform”. One might say it needs more than reform.”
Fidel Castro did the math 50 years ago: whether the terms are concessional or non-concessional, the debt is unpayable, and it is morally monstrous to attempt to collect it.
https://www.cadtm.org/Fidel-Castro-The-debt-is-unpayable
I’m more interested in what gives Schwab and the WEF its influence in proposing such issues that require solutions? Who’s the real fool — WEF or the corporations funding such proposals?
Adam
This is partly where the problem lies
“This combination of flows should rob of us of any illusions about the actual operation of public-private development finance when it comes under short-term stress. The idea of so-called “blended development finance” is that modest amounts of public funds will be intelligently leveraged to generated larger private flows. What happened in 2023 was the reverse. With private funding accelerating its retreat from 2022 to 2023, non-concessional development funding was procylical. Far from increasing it not only decreased, but became net negative. And though concessional funding, to the poorest most-stressed borrowers, increased, it did so to a minuscule degree and was entirely powerless to off-set the overall rebalancing.”
The problem lies in the very framing of blended finance by the originators of this term. Traditional definitions of blended finance offered by OECD, IFC and Convergence are problematic as they focus too narrowly on public sources of finance and only only on financial capital.
My work on the Triple B Framework addresses these flaws. https://www.resiliencecapitalventures.com/triplebframeworkpositionpaper
Would be keen to hear your take on this.
To blame “blended finance” simply because the coiners of the term are impenetrable to constructive critique would be disappointing.
All the best
GMM
Dr Gillian Marcelle
CEO
Resilience Capital Ventures