Sustainable Development, COVID-19 and Small Business in Greece: Small Is Not Beautiful

The aim of this article is s to show that contrary to the common parlance and to the widespread belief that treats small business as “the backbone of the economy”, in the sense of being the prime motor of wealth and prosperity, therefore the underlying logic is what is good for small business will also help government achieves overall economic policy goals, the prevailing dominant idea that formulates and drives the Greek economic policy is quite the opposite. Based on textual analysis, from Greece’s Structural Adjustment Programs, to the various assessment reports, till the latest “Development Plan for the Greek Economy”, we attempt to reveal that the prevailing idea that penetrates the abovementioned texts is that “small is not beautiful”. Specifically, after indicating a policy paradox regarding the limited financial support that Greek small businesses received or expected to receive despite their vital importance to the Greek economy, we expose the “structural impediment” idea. According to the latter the existence of a large share of small business in the Greek economy is being considered as a structural impediment for economic growth and prosperity. The implication is a policy dictum that favours a form of an evolutionary natural selection process, whereby only those establishments successful enough to grow will be able to survive, thus the vast bulk of the remaining small firms will exit the market.

A Strong Judiciary as a Crisis for Democracy: A ‘Law and Development’ Study from Pakistan

By the late 1990s, international financial institutions prescribed a ‘good governance’ paradigm that sought to empower the judiciary to curb ‘state capture’ by the corrupt political elites of developing countries. Good governance was supposed to act as a midwife to economic development, providing the ‘rule of law’ for the free market reforms of structural adjustment programs that had hitherto failed to provide much success. This article examines the implementation of ‘good governance’ in Pakistan, arguing that empowering the judiciary served to weaken an already weak legislature. The tangible issues of popular political representation and economic redistribution were displaced by the discourses on the control of corruption and the rule of law. Based on this experience, the article encourages a shift in law and developmental theorizing to focus on forms of legislature and democratic rule and a redefined role for the ‘civil society’ within this.

Analysis of Shareholding in Companies: Case of Mali

In this article, we analyze in the Malian context the link between the structure of the shareholding and the sustainability of companies based on data from the census of industrial enterprises of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, 2015. The results show that Mali’s economic opening option in the 1980s, strengthened in the 1990s following the implementation of the Structural Adjustment Programs, resulting in the state’s withdrawal from the management of enterprises, have enabled the emergence of private enterprises in almost all sectors of economic activity. However, shareholding in industrial enterprises has suffered from poor governance. It also shows that the number of women entrepreneurs is close to that of men. Between 2010 and 2014, the majority of shareholders are in the agri-food sector. The majority of the investment is in the metal and metallurgical sector.

Racial Capitalism, Slavery, Labour Regimes and Exploitation in the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program

This paper will attempt to critically examine Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) with an intent of connecting four themes: the Canadian agricultural industry, indentured servitude, the labour regime in Canada, and the racialization of the SAWP. It has been argued that the workers from the Caribbean who participate in the Temporary Agricultural Workers Program are should consider themselves fortunate to be given such an opportunity. I argue that this assertion is problematic because it overlooks the hardship the workers face in Canada as a result of their non-citizen status. I also examine the fact that many of the workers enlisted in the SAWP are forced to migrate for a living wage due to poor economic conditions in their countries of origin, and that these conditions are a direct consequence of unequal trade policies and structural adjustment programs. Finally, I demonstrate Canada’s complicity in benefiting from these programs.

Global Pharmaceuticals and East Africa

This chapter traces the shift in the pharmaceutical markets in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda from markets dominated by originator (brand-name) drugs produced by western companies to markets dominated by generic drugs produced in the global South, most prominently, in India. The rise of Indian exports was not simply a consequence of conditions in India, as it is often suggested. In East Africa, it was also a consequence of market liberalization imposed through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) on the three countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically, the removal of foreign exchange restrictions—combined with inadequate regulation of the pharmaceutical market—allowed an unmonitored entry of drugs into the private market. The chapter then describes the ongoing efforts by multinational pharmaceutical companies to slow down that shift—especially by strengthening intellectual property rights. It also examines why reports on the prevalence of Chinese drugs in East Africa are greatly exaggerated.

Decentralization in One Valley

This chapter talks about decentralization, which was in fact an enduring and characteristic form of government in the Americas by the time of the Great Depression. It was reimagined and redeployed twice during the subsequent years, first as a developmentalist prescription to expand the responsibilities of weak states, and later as an instrument to break down established state functions. During the 1980s, Colombian economist Eduardo Wiesner had served as the Western Hemisphere director for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), pushing through structural adjustment programs throughout the region. By the 1990s, he was an advisor to the World Bank and an international authority on state decentralization. The power and example of decentralized corporations have reordered the political economy of the region and the very terms in which political economy was discussed.

Decentralization Reborn

This chapter describes Eduardo Wiesner as an International Monetary Fund and World Bank economist of the 1980s and 1990s. During those years, he acquired a notorious reputation for negotiating structural adjustment programs across Latin America, and he championed new forms of decentralization that took apart developmental states. Wiesner was no dissident outsider to developmental state-building; he was a product of it. Wiesner's career in Washington grew from his work in Colombia, and nothing makes that fact clearer than his decades of writing on state decentralization. During the 1990s, Wiesner distinguished himself as an authority on decentralization, and he and his colleagues at the World Bank presented it as an adjunct to structural adjustment.