The funeral for Venezuelan president, Hugo Rafaél Chávez Frías, was held the morning of Friday March 8th, at the Military Academy in Caracas, Venezuela. 55 countries sent delegations to the funeral. 33 of them were headed by presidents or heads of government. In a strong show of unity and support, every single one of Latin America’s presidents, and most of the Caribbean’s heads of state were present at Chávez’s funeral (though the presidents of Brazil and Argentina left early). 

This is a turnout with few precedents. The death of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963 brought together a total of 19 heads of state. The funeral of President Ronald Reagan in 2004 gathered 36 former and current heads of state. The death of Hugo Chávez brought together at least 38 former and current heads of state.

The governments of Spain, France, Portugal, Lebanon, Finland, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Australia, Syria, Greece, Ukraine, Croatia, Jordan, Slovenia, Turkey, Gambia, China, and Russia sent fairly high level delegations to represent their governments at the funeral. Spain’s royal heir, the prince of Asturias, attended, as did the General Secretary of the Organization of American States José Miguel Insulza, the Reverend Jesse Jackson –who spoke at the funeral, actor Sean Penn, and the much celebrated Venezuelan orchestra director Gustavo Dudamel, who missed one of his shows at the Los Angeles Philharmonic to direct the Simón Bolívar Symphonic Orchestra at the funeral.

Though much of the major media has ignored this international show of recognition for the government of Hugo Chávez, these responses to his death are a clear affirmation of respect and acknowledgement for his legacy, from Latin America and around the world.

In a Huffington Post column today, Jeffrey Sachs picks up where he left off in a co-authored column with Joe Scarborough that appeared in the Post last week. There are two main threads to Sachs' argument. The first is that we would have been much better off with an ambitious public investment agenda than the actual stimulus package that was passed by Congress. The second is that we would have been better doing nothing than getting a stimulus of the sort we got, or even worse, getting a larger stimulus of the same variety.

It is difficult to believe that Sachs thinks he is really quarreling with Krugman on the first point. Krugman has been a vocal advocate of exactly the sort of public investment that Sachs is advocating. (There may be an issue as to how such a stimulus should have been paid for. Sachs is advocating tax increases on the wealthy and a financial transactions tax, as has Krugman. It is not clear whether he thinks these tax increases should have been put in place in 2009 when the economy was collapsing.)

The real point of disagreement is the best route if you don't get a big public investment stimulus. Sachs' position seems to be that the sort of tax cuts and modest spending increases that were part of the Obama stimulus were worse than nothing. He argues that the tax cuts were largely used to pay down debt as was the case of much of the spending, which took the form of transfers like food stamps and unemployment insurance. The net effect then is to raise the debt without providing much boost to the economy.

Sachs' claim does stand at odds with much research on the topic. The standard Keynesian models, used by the Congressional Budget Office and others, showed the stimulus creating in the range of 2-3 million jobs. This view also has been borne out by empirical work on the effect of the stimulus. 

The following is a collection of the latest labor market policy research reports:

Center for Economic and Policy Research

The Human Capital Dimensions of Sustainable Investment: What Investment Analysts Need to Know
Thomas Kochan, Eileen Appelbaum, Carrie Leana and Jody Hoffer Gittell

Center for Law and Social Policy

Implementing Earned Sick Days Laws: Learning from Seattle's Experience
Liz Ben-Ishai

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Changes in TANF Work Requirements Could Make Them More Effective in Promoting Employment
Liz Schott and LaDonna Pavetti

Demos

Discredited: How Employment Credit Checks Keep Qualified Workers Out Of A Job
Amy Traub

Dean Baker
Debate Club (U.S. News & World Report), March 8, 2013

Dean Baker
The Guardian Unlimited, March 8, 2013

On February 27, the office of the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO) for the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) launched an audit of the lending arm’s $30 million investment in Tegucigalpa-based Corporación Dinant, which produces palm oil and food products. The audit comes in response to widespread claims of violence, intimidation, and illegal evictions carried out by Dinant’s private security guards in Honduras’ Bajo Aguán valley, the center of the country's ongoing land struggle. In offering its resources and reputation to the company, the World Bank and its member countries are complicit in the deaths of countless innocent farmers.

The COA’s review began just two days after the United Nations Working Group on the use of mercenaries urged the Honduran government “to properly investigate and prosecute crimes committed by private security guards and to ensure that victims receive effective remedies.” A delegation from the Working Group was in the country from February 18 to 22, when it met with government officials and representatives of civil society and the private sector, including security firms. The delegates voiced their particular concern about the “alleged involvement of private security companies hired by landowners in widespread human rights violations including killings, disappearances, forced evictions and sexual violence against representatives of peasant associations in the Bajo Aguán region.” Dinant is the largest single landholder in the region.

An appointed panel of unnamed experts is currently convened in Washington, D.C., to review both the IFC’s adherence to its social and environmental policies and the role Dinant has played in the abuses. Many human rights observers consider the company’s owner, Miguel Facussé, to be one of the country’s most powerful men and hold him responsible for the killings of dozens of campesinos.

The audit had been a long time coming. On November 19, 2010, the human rights organization Rights Action wrote a letter to the World Bank’s then-president Robert Zoellick demanding that the financial institution suspend its funding to Honduras. The group cited the “context of grave human rights abuses and lack of independence of the justice system” as grounds to withhold funding, and characterized support for Dinant as “a case of gross negligence of the World Bank's human rights and due diligence obligations.” In the letter, Rights Action also noted that “at least 19 farmers in this region have been killed in the context of conflicts with biofuel industry interests.” (In a new report released two weeks ago, the same group declared that 88 farmers and their supporters have been killed in Bajo Aguán since January 2010, most of them in targeted assassinations.)

March 2013, Thomas Kochan, Eileen Appelbaum, Carrie Leana, and Jody Hoffer Gittell

Mark WeisbrotAl Jazeera English, 5 de março, 2013Em inglês | Em espanhol

March 8, 2013

March 8, 2013 (Jobs Byte)

Joe Scarborough is apparently feeling emboldened by his exchange with Paul Krugman on the Charlie Rose show and is doubling down on his confused anti-deficit tirades. He is back with an oped in the Post, co-authored with Jeffrey Sachs, who should know better.

The piece is a cornucopia of confusion, beginning with the first sentence:

"Dick Cheney and Paul Krugman have declared from opposite sides of the ideological divide that deficits don’t matter, but they simply have it wrong."

I am not in the defense of Paul Krugman business, but surely Jeffrey Sachs knows that Paul Krugman does not argue that deficits do not matter as a general proposition. What Krugman has argued very vociferously is that deficits do not matter in an economy that is operating far below its potential, as is the case with the United States today. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the economy's output will be more than 6 percent (@ $1 trillion) below potential this year. Projected 2013 output is almost 10 percent below the real level of output that CBO had projected in 2008 before it recognized the impact of the collapse of the housing bubble.

In a period of widespread unemployment and excess capacity, like the present, deficits cannot have the negative effect that they would if the economy were near full employment. In an economy near full employment, the argument would be that deficits push up interest rates. Higher interest rates will have the effect of reducing investment. They will also tend to put upward pressure on the dollar. A higher valued dollar will make imports cheaper, causing us to buy more from abroad. It will also make our exports more expensive, leading us to sell less to foreigners. The result is an increase in our trade deficit.

On Tuesday, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez passed away after 14 years in office. Below is a series of graphs that illustrate the economic and social changes that have taken place in Venezuela during this time period.

1. Growth (Average Annual Percent)

Source: Banco Central de Venezuela

This graph shows overall GDP growth as well as per-capita growth in the pre-Chávez (1986-1999) era and the Chávez presidency.

From 1999-2003, the government did not control the state oil company; in fact, it was controlled by his opponents, who used it to try to overthrow the government, including the devastating oil strike of 2002--2003.  For that reason, a better measure of economic growth under the Chávez government would start after it got control over the state oil company, and therefore the economy.

Above you can see this growth both measured from 2004, and for the 1999-2012 period. We use 2004 because to start with 2003, a depressed year due to the oil strike, would exaggerate GDP growth during this period; by 2004, the economy had caught up with its pre-strike level of output. Growth after the government got control of the state oil company was much faster.  

2. Public vs. Private Growth – 1999-2012 (Average Annual Percent)

Source: Banco Central de Venezuela

This graph shows the growth of the private sector versus the public sector during the Chávez years.

3. Inflation: Pre-Chávez vs. Chávez Years

Source: Banco Central de Venezuela

Inflation in Venezuela, consumer price index.

4. Unemployment Rate: Before and After Oil Strike

Source: Banco Central de Venezuela, INEC

After the oil strike (and the deep recession that it caused) ended in 2003, unemployment dropped drastically, following many years of increases before Chávez was elected. In 1999, when Chávez took office, unemployment was 14.5 percent; for 2011 it was 7.8 percent.

With news of President Obama's efforts to make some Republican BFFs, there are reports that he's trying to make a deal by yet again offering to cut Social Security and other benefits, while at the same time raising income taxes on almost everyone.  

This would be done by changing an official measure of inflation to a new index, called the Chained CPI.  As CEPR has shown, this change would lead to a painful cut in Social Security benefits and a stealth tax hike, by slowing down annual increases in Social Security and other benefits – including those for veterans, the disabled, and low-income children and their families – as well as income tax brackets. (That would lead to incomes jumping to higher brackets faster, or in other words, tax increases.)

In fact, as Howard Gleckman at the Tax Policy Center recently noted, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that moving to the Chained CPI "would raise taxes as much as it would cut spending."

Eileen AppelbaumEconomic Intelligence (U.S. News & World Report), March 6, 2013