The National Press Club
Bloomberg Room 529 14th Street NW Washington, DC 20045
Aug 22, 2016
1:30 PM (GMT-4)
Host:
The National Press Club
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) will launch its 2016 Trade and Development Report (TDR), one of the UN's flagship publications on Sept. 21 at the National Press Club. Elissa Braunstein, senior economist at UNCTAD, and Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, will be speaking at the event.
Some of the issues examined in this year's TDR include:
• The slowdown in global growth and the failure, in particular, of advanced economies to fashion a balanced policy mix to boost demand, raise productivity growth and achieve fairer outcomes. But the slowdown could intensify as downside risks increase in developing countries.
• The politicisation of trade. The Report focuses on the slowdown in trade, which it sees as a demand side problem, linked to wages lagging productivity across the global economy. Increased protectionism (whether rising tariffs or non-tariff measures) does not offer an explanation for this slowdown (as, for example, the WTO has been arguing), and runs the danger of diverting attention from what does.
• The erosion of the profit-investment nexus. "Financialization" has weakened the investment climate, in particular the reinvestment of profits in productive investment. This has been the case in advanced economies for some time, where corporations have been using higher profits to pay dividends, repurchase share and invest in financial instruments. This is becoming visible in emerging economies.
• A concern that debt crises could resurface in the developing world given the combination of slower growth, falling commodity prices, highly volatile capital flows and the prospect (without predicting when) of rising interest rates.
• The revival of industrial policies, in developed and developing countries alike. The approach needs to move beyond picking winners to thinking about an integrated policy approach in support of linkage building.
For more information on this event, contact elissa.braunstein[at]unctad.org.
