February 6, 2025
InterviewsRecycled Liberalism
An interview with Marta Castilho on the EU–Mercosur trade agreement
Since 1999, the European Union (EU) and Mercosur have been negotiating a bi-regional partnership agreement comprising three pillars: trade, cooperation, and political dialogue. A quarter century later, in December 2024, the parties announced the conclusion of negotiations during the Mercosur Summit in Montevideo, attended by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Before implementation, the…
Longform
February 11, 2025
InterviewsParty Bus
An interview with André Singer on the right, party politics, and Brazil’s position in the world
While the world’s attention was focused on the United States presidential election that would deliver Donald Trump a decisive victory and a second Presidency, Brazil’s municipal elections in October were signalling the political balance for the coming years within the…
February 5, 2025
AnalysisAfter the Diamond Rush
South Africa and the internationalization of mineral extraction
For over 150 years, mining has constituted a core feature of the South African economy. The seemingly inexhaustible bounty of the earth made the country the wealthiest in the continent and financed one of the most all-encompassing systems of racial…
January 30, 2025
AnalysisState and Development
Brazil’s biggest trading partner impedes its investment capacity
The world economy has seen a resurgence of industrial policy in recent decades. National development programs are at the center of a variety of polarizing geopolitical axes: carbon emissions, world manufacturing shares, and integration into rival trade and investment blocs.…
January 30, 2025
AnalysisAfter Antitrust
The recent priority on antitrust enforcement obscures more direct solutions to wealth inequality: taxation and regulation.
During the 1950s and 1960s, 35 percent of workers were unionized, 25 percent of the economy by GDP was price regulated, the corporate tax rate was 53 percent, and the top marginal income tax rate was 94 percent. Inequality fell…
January 25, 2025
InterviewsDecolonizing Jamaica
An interview with Professor Anthony Bogues on Michael Manley’s centenary
The ideas of the Jamaican political leader Michael Manley had a global impact that continues to be felt today. As the leader of the People’s National Party (PNP) from 1969 to 1992, and particularly in his first period as prime…
January 16, 2025
AnalysisDevelopmental Tracks
American railroad regulation as industrial policy
Recent years have seen an astonishing resurgence of industrial policy as a legislative agenda and topic for lively debate. Thanks in large part to the waning political fortunes of neoliberalism, deliberate efforts by governments to shape the economic trajectories of…
January 16, 2025
AnalysisAdverse Terrain
Brazil’s experiments in labor law
The 2017 reform of Brazil’s labor law is part of a broader movement that arose over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, with the purpose of eroding labor rights on an international…
January 8, 2025
AnalysisSelling Power
The design of energy finance, from the New Deal to the IRA
A comparison of the New Deal power program and the IRA exposes key design questions regarding the financing of power systems.
December 27, 2024
AnalysisBrave New World
A third industrial divide?
Endogenous dynamics have crippled the current growth wave that began in the 1980s—yielding the period of decay in which we are now living. Rather than achieving a new stability of horizontal competition, the turn toward the market brought about a…
December 18, 2024
AnalysisStructural Dependence
Austerity and authoritarianism in Pakistan
In November 2024, demonstrators from various cities of Pakistan defied lockdowns to gather in Islamabad and demand that Imran Khan, former Prime Minister, be released immediately from jail. Khan, incarcerated since the summer of 2023, has been charged with a…
Shortform
February 13, 2025
AnalysisOil in the Imperial Periphery
Brunei’s unlikely path to independence
The majority of the nearly two hundred sovereign states that exist today were born through decolonization following the end of the Second World War. With the colonial metropole fearing the emergence of unstable and unviable states, smaller territories were often…
February 6, 2025
AnalysisSlashing the State
Argentina under Milei’s chainsaw
Unlike on economic issues, where Milei’s agenda made swift concessions to macrismo, his cultural and ideological crusade only escalated once in power.
Polycrisis 2025
Diplomacy, finance, and extraction in the year ahead
The United States will be a source of chaos and volatility for the next several years. The first month of 2025 has set the scene. Events so far have included imperial gangsterism against both a poor Latin American country (Colombia)…
December 18, 2024
AnalysisTransfer and Transition
Technology transfer and green industrial transformation
Over the past years of escalating trade disputes between China and the US, the latter has repeatedly highlighted a practice it considers anathema: technology transfers that US companies need to offer to their Chinese collaborators if they want to do…
America First?
Escalation and reverberations in the trade war
The reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency has sent shockwaves around the world. And just hours after results came in, the ruling three-party German coalition government, which had been teetering for months, collapsed. The survival of dominant political coalitions in…
October 16, 2024
AnalysisBreaking Up Google
Antitrust, competition, and the intricacies of monopoly
In late August, Judge Amit P. Mehta of US District Court for the District of Columbia found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online search. Google had paid billions to device manufacturers and browser developers—including Apple, Samsung and…
Marshall Plans
New green industrial diplomacy?
At September’s UN General Assembly in New York, Brazil’s President Lula described the international financial system as a “Marshall Plan in reverse” in which the poorest countries finance the richest. Driving the point home, Lula thundered, “African countries borrow at…
October 9, 2024
AnalysisAdaptation in the Sanctioned Economy
Domestic manufacturing, overcapacity, and the limits of Iran’s economic resilience
The oil boom of the late 2000s created significant headwinds for Iranian manufacturers. As the value of oil exports surged, the Iranian rial appreciated, real wages rose, and foreign goods flooded the Iranian market. Middle-class families relished in their newfound…
September 4, 2024
AnalysisLabor’s Gains?
What do large-unit elections tell us about the state of the American labor movement?
In 2023, a “banner year” for labor in many regards, only 115,551 workers voted in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections, out of roughly 160 million workers in the United States labor force. In FY 2018, that number was…
The Contest to Shape “Country Platforms”
IMF reforms and Bangladesh’s revolt
Last month, young people in Bangladesh revolted against their government over a jobs quota bill that would have reserved 30 percent of public-sector jobs for family members of veterans of the 1971 war with Pakistan. Protestors did manage to drive…
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Series
Series are collections of works published by Phenomenal World on a single subject or area of research. Series are commissioned to analyze particular issues or historical moments, and are either ongoing projects or collected as one-time volumes.
The Polycrisis is a newsletter and a series of essays and panels exploring intersecting crises with a particular emphasis on the political economy of climate change and global North/South dynamics. It is edited by Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie. Follow The Polycrisis on Twitter here.
Polycrisis 2025
Diplomacy, finance, and extraction in the year ahead
The United States will be a source of chaos and volatility for the next several years. The first month of 2025 has set the scene. Events so far have included imperial gangsterism against both a poor Latin American country (Colombia)…
America First?
Escalation and reverberations in the trade war
The reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency has sent shockwaves around the world. And just hours after results came in, the ruling three-party German coalition government, which had been teetering for months, collapsed. The survival of dominant political coalitions in…