The Bridge of Planets

CIRCULAR ECONOMY

In July, UN Trade and Development released their Digital Economy Report 2024, which gives special attention to the intersection between environmental sustainability and production within the rapidly evolving digital economy. The report recommends “a more circular digital economy that would seek to reduce, reuse and recycle digital devices and infrastructure, including by extending their lifespan.” 

In a 2022 paper, Pablo Alonso-Fernández and Rosa María Regueiro-Ferreira study the impact of extractivism and ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) on South America:

“Free trade is a key factor in explaining the EUE, as it facilitates both productive relocations and the control of natural resources by more developed countries. The promotion of development through commodity exports has deepened the extractivist specialisation of South American countries. At the same time, unfavourable terms of trade, resulting from the significant difference in value added between their imports and exports, and the usual strategy followed by many developed countries of setting progressive tariffs according to the value added of the traded goods, has led to South America being caught in a specialisation trap. The only way for these countries to increase their incomes and finance imports or meet debt payments is to increase commodity production, because in the commodity market it is not easy to raise prices, they have hardly any internationally competitive industries, and their industrial exports are constrained by the tariff strategy of developed countries.”

 “The Social Metabolism concept shows the economy’s physical growth and its widening of the frontiers, scales and extraction speeds at the heart of the environmental problems. There has been a large growth of the social metabolism (the flows of energy and materials) in the economies of the Andean countries.” By Mario Pérez-Rincón, Julieth Vargas Morales, and Zulma Crespo-Marín. Link. And see José Gabriel Palma on the consequences of different patterns of specialization and export for the long-term growth paths of developing countries. Link.

+  “Lithium resources are highly concentrated in South America. Geopolitical realignments, the urgency to decarbonise and the race to lead 5G and AI in a digitalised world have placed critical minerals centre-stage in the competition among leading industrial actors.” By Sophia Kalantzakos. Link. “Successful implementation of direct lithium extraction technologies in the Lithium Triangle would appear to reduce externalities on the local water supply and the concomitant effects on indigenous communities.” By Ryan C. Berg and T. Andrew Sady-Kennedy. Link.

+  “We call for an explicit ban against planned obsolescence. We also propose that a unified and mandatory durability and reparability labeling system may prove beneficial. These labels should inform and empower consumers.” By Samuel Becher and Anne-Lise Sibony. Link. And see an ILO report on how a circular economy can provide solutions for youth employment in the global South. Link.

NEW RESEARCHERS

Land reform

JEN-KUANG WANG is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at Penn State. In a 2024 paper, coauthored by Oliver Kim, he challenges the longstanding view that land reform was a major factor behind Taiwan’s economic takeoff.

From the paper:

“Unlike with public land, private lands redistributed under land-to-the-tiller did not benefit from freer crop choice, since they were not previously contracted to the Taiwan Sugar Company. But another important factor to consider is the operating size of farms: the land-to-the-tiller reform may have created holdings that were too small to fully support most households economically. Applying the 1961 average rice yield (2.4 tons/hectare) and the implied median farm sizes of the mean treated townships (0.2 hectares) as a rule of thumb, the average holding produced just 480 kilograms of rice a year—less than what it takes to support a single adult on 2,000 calories a day, and far too little to support a whole household. By contrast, areas with more public land redistribution saw operating farm sizes largely unchanged, with the median farm (still relatively small at half a hectare) able to comfortably support the annual caloric needs of two adults with its rice output.”

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+  Join JFI and our affiliate initiative the Center for Active Stewardship for several events during NYC Climate Week later this month:

+  “The stifling political atmosphere in the West Bank gives rise to a fear of the mukhabarat, the intelligence state, in a now-typical Arab fashion—but here in the West Bank we just have the repressive capabilities of the state, without the actual state.” New on PW, Fathi Nimer on recent escalations in the West Bank, the state of the occupation post-Oslo, settlement expansion, and the Palestinian Authority. Link.

+  “Although Dilma was not the favorite candidate of businesspeople, there was a high expectation that the president would be re-elected—and it was this expectation that determined the apparent maintenance of industrial support until June 2013.” Also new on PW, Nicole Herscovici on the circumstantial alliance between the Workers’ Party and the business sector in Brazil. Link.

+  “Chinese estimates of capacity utilization show that manufacturers, particularly those in green industries, seem to be increasing their capacity to produce far faster than their actual production.” By Matthew C. Klein. Link.

+  “Founded in December 2017 by eight central banks and financial supervisors, the Network for Greening the Financial System is already credited with managing “to shift the discursive boundaries” in international policy debates.” By Eric Helleiner, Monica DiLeo, and Jens van ‘t Klooster. Link.

+  Peter Eckersley, Katarzyna Lakoma, Pete Murphy, Tom Caygill, and Charlotte Pell conceptualize the overlap between different governance paradigms to provide a framework for how future studies may be operationalized in governance arrangements. Link.

+  “The IRS was unable to collect almost $1 trillion a year in owed taxes because of lack of staff. The IRA included $80 billion to rebuild the capacity of the IRS, but some of that has been clawed back through subsequent budget fights.” Suzanne Kahn on rebuilding state capacity. Link.

+  “Israeli attacks on aid organizations have become routine, despite systems in place to avoid humanitarian deaths. Aid groups share their coordinates with Israeli authorities and then are attacked by the IDF at those same coordinates.” By Stephen Semler. Link.

+  “Antitrust law represents a vital tool for confronting undue market power and top-down domination in our economy. A true renewal of our anti-monopoly tradition will require not just stricter enforcement but a shift in philosophy.” An LPE Project round-up of back catalogue pieces covering antitrust law. Link.

+  “In 1554, the Crown asked local governments in Mexico to identify “big lakes or notable springs whose waters have some particular virtue” or usefulness due to some essential characteristic of that water. These virtues and their agency were not human, and “virtue” does not refer to the moral principles or forms of reasoning that philosophers in the Western tradition have long debated. Rather, virtues were qualities of the waters identified by their material effects on other bodies, human and nonhuman, and grouped by those effects and their assumed underlying causes. As time passed, the virtues of waters were increasingly defined in terms of therapy and medicine, and the long medical tradition coming down from antiquity through the Arabs identified categories of waters by their effects on human bodies, such as aiding in rheumatism, healing skin disease, or dissolving kidney stones.” By Casey Walsh. Link.

Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org

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