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prices of domestic and international investors in any case a theoretical flaw in any conception of a free global economy where each country accepts the world prices of commodities and adjusts its production structure to these prices lies in the fact that even assuming that there are no problems of global aggregate demand the locations where capital accumulates remain indeterminate the fact that underdeveloped countries have lower wages does not by any means ensure that capital would flow towards them rather than away from them as has historically happened but when we superimpose freedom of capital flows upon a situation of traverse as discussed above the problem becomes acute domestic deflation growing unemployment accelerating inflation accompanied by repeated depreciations of the exchange rate declining real wages of unorganised workers and the growing discontent that all this gives rise to together with the increasing criminalisation of the society provide the setting for capital flight and this only exacerbates the problem ensuring that the promised turnaround in the economy is postponed still further envisioning labour led urban development a collective reflection june 19 2026 june 19 2026 debolinamajumder leave a comment by debolina majumder and michaela collord across the global south cities and city regions are growing fast drawing attention to questions of urban development and its place in contemporary processes of capitalist development but development for whom by whom these are pressing questions amidst growing urban inequalities they are all the more preoccupying given widespread assumptions that urban labouring classes remain weak and in many instances surplus to the needs of capital pushing back against these assumptions researchers and organisers gathered recently to ask what would urban development look like if it started with workers what would it mean to envisionlabour led urban development llud rather than capital or state centred development their collective reflections follow as does an invitation join their conversation via a new listserv read more dead souls in the sugarlands counterinsurgency and the moral life of solidarity in negros june 8 2026 june 19 2026 sarah raymundo leave a comment in nikolai gogol s dead souls the peasant appears twice dead first in life as property then in death as inventory lingering in the bureaucratic ledgers of the empire pavel chichikov gogol s wandering con man traverses provincial russia purchasing the names of deceased serfs still counted in the census so he can accumulate fictive wealth from human absence the grotesque brilliance of the novel lies not merely in the absurdity of the scheme but in gogol s revelation that serfdom corrupts everyone the peasant suffers most brutally but landlords bureaucrats merchants and respectable society itself become spiritually deformed by a social order that converts human beings into abstraction gogol was not a revolutionary prophet yet history would eventually sweep away the old landed order through the russian revolution of 1917 as if the moral rot he diagnosed had become historically unbearable i carried gogol with me to negros not literally of course one does not bring russian novels to fact finding missions in a countryside thick with military checkpoints grief and the scorching heat that clings to the sugar fields but dead souls returned to me in toboso as we listened to the initial accounts surrounding the massacre of the negros 19 their names had already begun entering the cold grammar of state security discourse even before families could fully mourn them encounter armed rebels recovered firearms the dead transformed almost instantly into administrative objects into a narrative assembled in advance by counterinsurgency but the farmers and residents knew the dead otherwise they knew who laughed most easily who planted monggo beans who worried over school expenses who hummed songs while walking who sang softly while planting who fetched water before dawn they remembered those whom the fact finding mission confirmed as civilians alyssa alano errol wendel maureen santuyo rj ledesma kai sorem and lyle prijoles not as names suspended in the cold grammar of casualty reports but as lives once woven into the ordinary intimacies of community into fields unfinished conversations and futures interrupted while the state speaks in categories the masses remember persons read more the current western angst and a case for development studies 2 0 june 4 2026 may 28 2026 caroline cornier leave a comment in september 2025 adam tooze sent a shock wave through development studies circles in the west with an essay entitled the end of development he declared the evident truth that the west s aid model was always a mirage and that the un sustainable development goals now look less like a new dawn than the final gasp of a unipolar end of history fantasy yet so called development speaks to more than aid and western dominance this blog post argues that what might be the end of aid could be the beginning of understanding and studying development as an endogenous process within international constraints and opportunities for this to happen we as development scholars need to resist falling back into narrow conceptions of development as either aid based or big power rivalry and overcome anxious paralysis and self pity over the end of uncontested us hegemony instead we need to use the current moment as an opportunity to rethink and finally effectively conceptualise how national politics and global economic structures condition each other read more industrial policy between rentierisation and retaliation may 29 2026 may 31 2026 shiran illanperuma leave a comment industrial policy once a taboo in mainstream economics is being mainstreamed by the very institutions that spent four decades stigmatising it in march 2026 the world bank published industrial policy for development approaches in the 21st century co authored by ana margarida fernandes and tristan reed the imf has done a similar volte face first in its 2019 working paper the return of the policy that shall not be named and again in the october 2025 world economic outlook which has a chapter titled industrial policy managing trade offs to promote growth and resilience that the imf and world bank have now openly readmitted industrial policy into their vocabulary is no small thing does it mean the tide has turned on austerity and market fundamentalism the argument of this article is that this rhetorical turn arrives bound by two structural constraints that the new bretton woods literature largely refuses to confront the ongoing rentierisation of global south economies through imf world bank conditionality and the imperial retaliation that meets serious attempts at sovereign industrialisation industrial policy on the terms set by washington and wall street will not free up the policy space the global south needs it risks becoming another financial product or technocratic buzzword layered onto an already extractive architecture read more stabilising wages fragmenting workers what comes after indonesia s wage ruling may 15 2026 may 14 2026 anindyadessi 2 comments what actually constitutes the key agenda for workers in indonesia beyond celebrating may day as a symbol of struggle wages in indonesia are never truly negotiated they are determined stabilized and at the same time separated from the political power that should be able to challenge them since the authoritarian new order regime the state has built a corporatist framework that not only suppresses independent worker organizations but also fragments the possibility of forming an effective collective force reformasi did open space for freedom of association yet instead of producing consolidation what emerged was fragmentation many unions but weak and divided thus when integrated into global value chains this configuration finds its function the state no longer needs to repress workers overtly it suffices to stabilize wages through mechanisms that appear technocratic while allowing fragmentation to persist in this way low wages in indonesia are not a failure but rather the result of a strategy historically shaped and continuously reproduced a form of partial class accommodation uneven and spatially conditioned control over workers today no longer operates primarily through open repression but through the way wages are calculated and normalized as a technical matter wage setting formulas that link minimum wage increases to inflation and economic growth are presented as rational policies to maintain balance between worker and business yet this is precisely where the politics operates wage conflict is removed from the arena of collective bargaining and locked into calculations that from the outset limit bargaining space this shift becomes clear when compared to the mechanism based on decent living needs khl which although not entirely free from depoliticization still opened space for surveys and the articulation of demands particularly in industrial areas with high concentrations of workers because it was seen as disrupting worker cost stabilization this space was later closed through formulas that standardize increases while simultaneously dampening conflict concessions to workers are not entirely eliminated but emerge as the result of struggles that under certain conditions succeed in forcing the state and capital to grant space as in the case of thr and the expansion of social security through bpjs however these achievements do not alter the fundamental structure of wages which remains low and fragmented rather they appear as limited and segmented compromises thus what is produced is not merely wage stabilization but also the management of workers power itself on the one hand there are forms of protection that are concentrated and appear progressive while on the other the underlying structure continues to maintain spatial differentiation and the collective weakness of worker in this condition class compromise does not occur comprehensively but is produced partially unevenly and remains locked within a low wage regime read more green debt bondage how indonesia s electric transition deepens platform driver exploitation may 5 2026 may 4 2026 arif novianto leave a comment somewhere in the state of maharashtra a cotton farmer took his own life after years of compounding debt and crop failure across india this tragedy is not rare the national crime records bureau recorded 11 290 farmer and farm labourer suicides in 2022 roughly one death every hour with debt consistently identified as a leading cause down to earth 2023 in sulawesi indonesia villages are being cleared to make way for nickel smelters that supply the batteries of the global electric vehicle boom workers at the indonesia morowali industrial park earn higher wages than they would in farming but face fatal furnace explosions and respiratory damage as recurring occupational risks campbell lee 2024 global witness 2025 and on the streets of jakarta yogyakarta and surabaya a new population of electric motorcycle drivers pedal their way through twelve fourteen sixteen hour days novianto 2025a servicing loans they never chose and rental fees that can never be fully paid these are not three unrelated stories they are distinct moments in a single global process the uneven extractive and deeply political reorganisation of labour under the banner of the green transition in this article i want to argue drawing on my fieldwork with electric vehicle ev platform drivers in indonesia that this reorganisation has produced what i call a regime of green debt bondage a configuration in which ecological transition platform governance and financialised credit converge to bind workers to perpetual labour without delivering the promised climate dividend debt bondage is most often associated with pre capitalist or early capitalist forms of coercion the indentured plantation worker the brick kiln labourer the trafficked domestic servant breman 2007 brass 2011 lebaron 2014 its reappearance inside the shiny algorithmic climate friendly infrastructure of platform capitalism should unsettle us it signals not a rupture from coercive labour regimes but their transformation into more diffuse and systemically embedded forms what i call green debt bondage refers to a condition in which workers are not only tied through credit rental schemes and platform deductions but are also structurally compelled to remain within precarious work due to the absence of viable decent employment alternatives in this regime indebtedness does not operate in isolation it interacts with broader labour market constraints that limit workers capacity to exit debt becomes a mechanism that deepens this entrapment pushing drivers to work longer hours accept worsening conditions and absorb greater risks simply to service obligations they cannot easily escape as such the greening of transport in southeast asia does not merely reorganise infrastructure but reconfigures coercion itself embedding exploitation within both financial relations and structural labour precarity under the banner of ecological transition read more posts navigation older posts this blog the developing economics blog takes critical approach to development economics it seeks to stimulate debate and critical reflection on economic development among academics and practitioners from all relevant fields follow blog via email email address follow join 2 247 other subscribers recent posts development planning c p chandrasekhar june 24 2026 macro economic policy and planning economic transformation prabhat patnaik june 24 2026 envisioning labour led urban development a collective reflection june 19 2026 dead souls in the sugarlands counterinsurgency and the moral life of solidarity in negros june 8 2026 the current western angst and a case for development studies 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