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Presentations from Brazil's Citizen City International Symposium

All of the presentations given at the first Citizen City International Symposium on Employer of Last Resort, held May 9-10, 2008 in Rio de Janeiro, are now available online.  Please click here to view a message from the event coordinator, as well as the final program with links to the presentations.

Presentations from the recent CDS Trivandrum Conference

All of the presentations and papers given at the conference, "Employment Opportunities and Public Employment Policy in Globalising India," held April 3-5, 2008 in Trivandrum, India are now available online. Please click here to view the final program and presentations.

UNDP consultancies on furthering employment for poverty reduction

We are pleased to announce that the Poverty Group of the Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP, is currently inviting short, two-page concept notes for seven consultancies on topics that are of critical interest and importance to our network's members:

(a) promising approaches for furthering employment for poverty reduction;

(b) employment focus on scaling-up of MDGs; and

(c) employment for poverty reduction diagnostic.

Please note that the deadline for submissions is July 2, 2008.

Brazilian Citizen City International Symposium on ELR

This symposium was hosted by the Brazilian Institute for Full Employment with participation of Economists for Full Employment, sponsored by the National Development Bank of Brazil (BNDES), May 9-10, 2008, in Rio de Janeiro.

Theme: The Citizen City International Symposium of ELR

Invitation Letter

Conference Program

Contact: Daniel Conceicao

New articles on India's NREGA program

Two new articles on India's NREGA program are available by clicking the links below:

Proposal from Iran...

Dr. Zahra Karimi intends to present a proposal for Employment Guarantee Scheme for Iran . She has put together a paper and invites comments, suggestions and general discussion. She writes: "I hope to receive the comments of our colleagues which will enable me to introduce EGS ideas in Iran more precisely."

To view the paper (in .pdf format), please visit http://www.economistsforfullemployment.org/news/iran_docs/karimi_1.pdf.
E-mail Dr. Karimi at zakarimi@umz.ac.ir.

Durban EFE report...

12th Regional Meeting on Labor Intensive Construction 2007
On October 8-12, 2007 five of our members presented their work and launched the network in a session organized by “Economists for Full Employment” during the Durban meeting, sponsored by the ILO and the Government of South Africa.

To read the text of the report in .pdf format, click here. To download the report in MS Word format, click here.

Brazil joins in!

Dear Supporters of Full Employment,  
 
I visited the site and I had the best impression of it.  Congratulations. I want to be in full contact with you and to make use of the site as an instrument of help to our campaign in Brazil. We know many of your members and advisers, that are well respected here. I'd like to become a full member as president of the Instituto  Desemprego Zero, the organization that fights for a full employment  politics in Brazil. We have many social organizations in the Full  Employment Campaign - already initiated in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, and to be initiated in São Paulo on November 28. It created "Frente Parlamentar pelo Pleno Emprego", with more than 80  representatives and more than 40 senators, under the presidency of  senator Marcelo Crivella, who I advise in these questions and in public hearings. We also are in contact with the principal central unions of workers - one,  the second in size, “Nova Central Sindical de Trabalhadores”, is already leading the campaign. Our group is restructuring our site www.desempregozero.org.br, where we will put a link for yours.  

Now, a point for your reflection: I think the new polarization in the world, as seen from Brazil, is one that opposes Neoliberalism and  full employment politics (or the real social democracy). But this is not clear for people. As long as it lasts, the forces of status quo will prevail. So, our task is to clear the waters and clarify these issues. Our campaign aims just to do it. Given the scale of financialization in Brazil, I think that is impossible to implement a full employment politics without a clear defeat of Neoliberalism. And the Armageddon of this fight will be nearer if we persuade people that unemployment is the inexorable consequence of Neoliberalism. For many reasons that we can discuss in the near future I think Brazil will be one of the main geographic centers of this ideological and political war.

So, I ask you to consider that the first conference of the network “economists for full employment” in 2008 to take place in Brazil, that eventually could draw the rest of Latin America. As soon as we have a translator, I will send some articles and essays of our site.

In solidarity,
Jose Carlos de Assis
President of the Instituto  Desemprego Zero

Read an INTRODUCTION/INTRODUÇA0 to the campaign (in English & Portuguese)

Letter to editor of L.A.Times...

Network members Pavlina Tcherneva and Randall Wray sent this response to an op-ed by Mark Wesibrot in the Los Angeles Times, "How Argentina jump-started its economy":

Mark Weisbrot makes no mention of the large public employment program for unemployed heads of households, known as the Jefes Plan, which was implemented in 2002 as a main tool for economic stabilization and generated 2 million jobs (13% of the labor force) at its peak. This program not only stabilized internal demand but also provided much needed income and services to Argentina's poor. It is this program that largely "jump-started" the economy. Government policies further helped the unemployed establish small cooperatives and microenterprises and, in some cases, take over abandoned factories and begin producing. Removing the straightjacket of the currency board, and defaulting on the foreign debt, were only the prerequisites that made these government policies possible. While lower interest rates and currency depreciation might have played some role, that was minor and could not have been done without first abandoning the dollar.

Standing up to the IMF is no longer enough. It is time to remember another important and long-forgotten lesson: that government pro-employment policies can play a key role in macroeconomic stabilization and economic development.

Pavlina Tcherneva and L. Randall Wray
Levy Economics Institute, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY