Mark Weisbrot | |
---|---|
Born | Mark Alan Weisbrot |
Academic career | |
Institution | Center for Economic and Policy Research |
Alma mater | University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (BA) University of Michigan (MA, PhD) |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
Mark Alan Weisbrot is an American economist and columnist. He is co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C. Weisbrot is President of Just Foreign Policy, a non-governmental organization dedicated to reforming United States foreign policy. [1]
Weisbrot was born in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a bachelor's degree in economics. Weisbrot received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. [2]
In 1999, Weisbrot co-founded, together with economist Dean Baker, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank which produces economic research on topics that affect people's lives to contribute to the public debate in the U.S. (inequality, macroeconomic policy and stability, labor markets, health and social programs, intellectual property, social security), and internationally: globalization and trade, the International Monetary Fund and institutions of global governance, Latin American and European economies, and US foreign policy. [3]
Weisbrot provided testimony to Congressional hearings in 2002 to a United States House of Representatives committee on the Argentine economic crisis (1999–2002) and in 2004 to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the state of democracy in Venezuela with what he said were U.S. efforts to undermine the government, and the media inside the country. [4] [5]
As an economist, Weisbrot has opposed privatization of the United States Social Security system and has been critical of neoliberal globalization and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). His work on Greece's ongoing debt crisis has influenced the debate over what measures the Greek government should take in negotiating a solution with the European Central Bank, European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund. [6] [7]
Weisbrot says that globalization as promoted by the United States government and multilateral lending institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank has failed poorer countries, stating that "no nation has ever pulled itself out of poverty under the conditions that Washington imposes on underdeveloped countries." [8] Economist Jeffrey Sachs has stated that Weisbrot was "the leader in fighting" the Washington Consensus behind much of this globalization. [9]
Weisbrot has been described as the "intellectual architect" [10] [11] [12] [13] behind the unsuccessful [14] [15] Bank of the South, a joint project by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela which was spearheaded by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. [16] He criticized the role played by the IMF while taking an active role in promoting the bank, describing the Bank of the South as "another Declaration of Independence for South America" and that it was "Latin America casting off Washington's shackles". [16] [17]
Weisbrot co-authors with CEPR a series of papers looking at the progress in economic growth and social indicators. In 2017, he presented the most recent report, which emphasized the role of China, with Sachs in Washington, D.C. [18]
Weisbrot has continued to suggest that the founding of other alternative lending and finance institutions that do not include participation by the U.S., such as those being created by the BRICS countries, may have positive implications both for borrowing countries and in terms of weakening the influence of Washington-based institutions like the IMF. [19]
Weisbrot has written and co-authored research papers and articles on the economies and politics of Latin America and the Caribbean for the past two decades. The countries covered include Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Beginning in 2001, Weisbrot challenged the prevailing consensus on the 1998–2002 Argentine great depression, arguing that IMF-supported austerity was counter-productive and that the country needed to devalue its currency in order to recover. After the Argentine government defaulted on its debt at the end of 2001, and allowed the currency to float against the dollar at the beginning of 2002, Weisbrot continued to argue against what he called harmful attempts by the IMF to influence policy in the post-default period. [20] He later wrote papers arguing the Argentina's policies in the 2002-2011 period, after its default and separation from the IMF, were successful.
Weisbrot has argued that, from 2003 to 2011, Brazil was successful in reducing poverty and inequality, and increasing GDP growth. [21] Weisbrot attributed these successes in part to policy changes that were an improvement over the neoliberal program Brazil adopted in the 1980s. However, he was critical of austerity and high interest rates after 2010, arguing that these were unnecessary and led to a prolonged recession. Weisbrot argued against the impeachment of former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the corruption conviction of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2018, pointing to a lack of precedent and evidence to justify the proceedings. [22]
Articles in The New York Times , [23] USA Today , [24] and The Washington Post [25] described Weisbrot as supportive of the policies implemented during Hugo Chávez's presidency. In a 2016 National Review article about Venezuela's deterioration following the Bolivarian Revolution, José Cárdenas, a former employee of the US State Department, the National Security Council and USAID, described Weisbrot as one of the "leftist admirers of Venezuela" and an "ardent cheerleader" of Chávez's socialist project. [26]
In 2013, Weisbrot praised the Venezuelan government for its gains in poverty, real income, employment, healthcare, and education, and said that the possibility of hyperinflation was "very remote", that economic problems were "not likely" and that "Venezuela has sufficient reserves". [27] A 2019 report by Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs said that a 31% rise in the number of deaths between 2017 and 2018 was due to the sanctions imposed on Venezuela in 2017, and that 40,000 people in Venezuela may have died as a result. [28] The report states: "The sanctions are depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food, and other essential imports." [28] Weisbrot stated that he "could not prove those excess deaths were the result of sanctions, but said the increase ran parallel to the imposition of the measures and an attendant fall in oil production". [28] A US State Department spokesperson said that, "as the writers themselves concede, the report is based on speculation and conjecture" [28] while Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, representative to the Inter-American Development Bank by the US-supported administration of Juan Guaidó, [29] said that the analysis was flawed because it made invalid assumptions about Venezuela based on a different country, Colombia, that the analysis failed to rule out other explanations and that it failed to correctly account for PDVSA finances. [30]
Weisbrot was an advisor, [31] and co-wrote with Tariq Ali the screenplay for the Oliver Stone's 2009 film, South of the Border , [32] which examined the "pink tide" of elected leftist governments in South America.
Weisbrot disagreed with Larry Rohter, the former South American bureau chief of The New York Times , over his statements on Venezuela, where Rohter said that in support of the film South of the Border, Weisbrot, Tariq Ali, and Oliver Stone manipulated data to present a positive image of Hugo Chávez. [33] Rohter described Weisbrot as "... an economist, not a historian, and apparently not a very good one", suggesting that he was "Either ... incompetent [or] deliberately manipulating the numbers." [33] Weisbrot contested the claims of inaccuracies, suggesting that they are indicative of sloppy and misleading coverage of Venezuela in the popular press, and saying that "the way most Americans get the idea that Venezuela is a dictatorship, for example, is from these editorials". [34]
Weisbrot writes for The Nation , [35] and The Hill . [36] He also writes an economic and policy issues column that is distributed across the United States by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. [5] From 2009 to 2014, he wrote a regular column for The Guardian . [37]
Weisbrot is co-author, with Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 1999). In the book, Weisbrot and Baker argue that much of the United States Social Security debate has been based on misconceptions, that privatization would be unlikely to improve the system, and that the system, in fact, performs satisfactorily and does not need substantial changes, needing only minor adjustments to in order to continue to pay all promised benefits for the ensuing 75 years. [38] In reviewing the book, The Economist wrote that “Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot have no trouble at all demonstrating that even on highly conservative assumptions about economic growth, the much-forecast insolvency of the Social Security system by about 2030 is most unlikely to happen then, if indeed ever.” [39]
Weisbrot's latest book is Failed: What the Experts Got Wrong About the Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2015). [40] In an interview, Weisbrot described the book as critiquing the bad macroeconomic policies often imposed by European authorities, who are ultimately unaccountable to the citizens of the sovereign states that they represent. These policies, he says, prolonged the economic crises in the aftermath of the Great Recession in Europe, which had a much higher unemployment rate than in the U.S., and forced unpopular economic policies of more vulnerable European countries. [41] Weisbrot has made these arguments in various contexts over the years, for example on Greece, [42] [43] on Spain, [44] and most recently, in The New York Times on the 2017 French presidential election. [45] In an otherwise positive review, Weisbrot was criticized for advocating that Greece would have been better off had it had left the eurozone during its economic crisis. [46] Noam Chomsky called Failed "careful and well-documented" and said it "makes a persuasive case that one goal of the [policies imposed by European authorities] has been to dismantle the social democratic policies that were one of Europe’s contributions to civilized life in the post-World War II period but were unwelcome to major centers of traditional power". [47]
Francisco Rodríguez, an economist of Wesleyan University accused Weisbrot of being biased for praising Hugo Chávez's economic policies and stated that Weisbrot's work had a "use of heavily slanted data". [48]
In a History News Network article, Larry Rohter, the former South American bureau chief of The New York Times stated that Weisbrot along with his colleague Tariq Ali "have sent to a number of news organizations and websites" claims that were "full of indisputably false assertions". Rohter also says that Weisbrot manipulated data to give a positive image of Hugo Chávez in the film South of the Border. [33] Weisbrot defended his work saying that Rohter didn't find any inaccuracies and that Rohter "tried rather desperately" to find inaccuracies that no one would notice. [49]
The economy of Ecuador is the eighth largest in Latin America and the 69th largest in the world by total GDP. Ecuador's economy is based on the export of oil, bananas, shrimp, gold, other primary agricultural products and money transfers from Ecuadorian emigrants employed abroad. In 2017, remittances constituted 2.7% of Ecuador's GDP. The total trade amounted to 42% of the Ecuador's GDP in 2017.
The economy of Venezuela is based primarily on petroleum. Venezuela is the 25th largest producer of oil in the world and the 8th largest member of OPEC. Venezuela also manufactures and exports heavy industry products such as steel, aluminum, and cement. Other notable manufacturing includes electronics and automobiles as well as beverages and foodstuffs. Agriculture in Venezuela accounts for approximately 4.7% of GDP, 7.3% of the labor force and at least one-fourth of Venezuela's land area. Venezuela exports rice, corn, fish, tropical fruit, coffee, pork and beef. Venezuela has an estimated US$14.3 trillion worth of natural resources and is not self-sufficient in most areas of agriculture. Exports accounted for 16.7% of GDP and petroleum products accounted for about 95% of those exports.
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was a Venezuelan politician and military officer who served as president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, except for a brief period of forty-seven hours in 2002. Chávez was also leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when it merged with several other parties to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which he led until 2012.
The Bolivarian Revolution is an ongoing political process in Venezuela that was started by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, the founder of the Fifth Republic Movement and later the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and his successor Nicolás Maduro. The Bolivarian Revolution is named after Simón Bolívar, an early 19th-century Venezuelan revolutionary leader, prominent in the Spanish American wars of independence in achieving the independence of most of northern South America from Spanish rule. According to Chávez and supporters, the Bolivarian Revolution seeks to build an inter-American coalition to implement Bolivarianism, nationalism and a state-led economy.
The Washington Consensus is a set of ten economic policy prescriptions considered to constitute the "standard" reform package promoted for crisis-wracked developing countries by Washington, D.C.-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and United States Department of the Treasury. The term was first used in 1989 by English economist John Williamson. The prescriptions encompassed free-market promoting policies such as trade liberalization, privatization and finance liberalization. They also entailed fiscal and monetary policies intended to minimize fiscal deficits and minimize inflation.
The 1998–2002 Argentine great depression was an economic depression in Argentina, which began in the third quarter of 1998 and lasted until the second quarter of 2002. It followed fifteen years of stagnation and a brief period of free-market reforms. The depression, which began after the Russian and Brazilian financial crises, caused widespread unemployment, riots, the fall of the government, a default on the country's foreign debt, the rise of alternative currencies and the end of the peso's fixed exchange rate to the US dollar. The economy shrank by 28 per cent from 1998 to 2002. In terms of income, over 50 per cent of Argentines lived below the official poverty line and 25 per cent were indigent ; seven out of ten Argentine children were poor at the depth of the crisis in 2002.
The Central Bank of the Argentine Republic is the central bank of Argentina, being an autarchic entity.
Dean Baker is an American macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) with Mark Weisbrot. Baker has been credited as one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–08 United States housing bubble.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) is an American think tank that specializes in economic policy. Based in Washington, D.C. CEPR was co-founded by economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot in 1999.
The Bank of the South or BancoSur is a monetary fund and lending organization established on 26 September 2009 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela with promises of initial capital of US$20 billion. Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil were to have each pledged $4 billion, and Uruguay, Ecuador, Paraguay and Bolivia were to have contributed smaller amounts. The bank intended to lend money to nations in the Americas to construct social programs and infrastructure. Documents establishing the bank as an entity were signed in 2007, and the agreement between the countries was finalized in 2009, but as of 2016, the bank had not been capitalized.
José De Gregorio Rebeco is a Chilean economist, academic, researcher, consultant and politician. He has been the Governor of the Central Bank of Chile, Minister of the Economy, Mining and Energy during the administration of Ricardo Lagos and is currently the Dean of the School of Economics and Business of the Universidad de Chile. He is also a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The pink tide, or the turn to the left, is a political wave and turn towards left-wing governments in Latin America throughout the 21st century. As a term, both phrases are used in political analysis in the news media and elsewhere to refer to a move toward more economic progressive or social progressive policies in the region. Such governments have been referred to as "left-of-centre", "left-leaning", and "radical social-democratic". They are also members of the São Paulo Forum, a conference of left-wing political parties and other organizations from the Americas.
From his election in 1998 until his death in March 2013, the administration of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez proposed and enacted populist economic policies as part of his Bolivarian Revolution.
South of the Border is a 2009 American documentary film directed by Oliver Stone. The documentary premiered at the 2009 Venice Film Festival. Writer for the project Tariq Ali calls the documentary "a political road movie".
Debt crisis is a situation in which a government loses the ability of paying back its governmental debt. When the expenditures of a government are more than its tax revenues for a prolonged period, the government may enter into a debt crisis. Various forms of governments finance their expenditures primarily by raising money through taxation. When tax revenues are insufficient, the government can make up the difference by issuing debt.
When elected in 2013, Nicolás Maduro continued the majority of existing economic policies of his predecessor Hugo Chávez. When entering the presidency, President Maduro's Venezuela faced a high inflation rate and large shortages of goods that was left over from the previous policies of President Chávez. These economic difficulties that Venezuela was facing were one of the main reasons of the current protests in Venezuela. President Maduro has blamed capitalism for speculation that is driving high rates of inflation and creating widespread shortages of staples, and often said he was fighting an "economic war", calling newly enacted economic measures "economic offensives" against political opponents he and loyalists state are behind an international economic conspiracy. However, President Maduro has been criticized for only concentrating on public opinion instead of tending to the practical issues economists have warned the Venezuelan government about or creating any ideas to improve the economic situation in Venezuela such as the "economic war".
Deborah James is an American activist. She is director of international programs at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and is on the Board of Directors of Global Exchange. Prior to her work for CEPR, James had been called "a top U.S. protest organizer" by the Center for Public Integrity. She was formerly the Director of the WTO Program at Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, the Global Economy Director at Global Exchange, and the Executive Director of the Venezuela Information Office.
An ongoing socioeconomic and political crisis began in Venezuela during the presidency of Hugo Chávez and has worsened during the presidency of his successor Nicolás Maduro. It has been marked by hyperinflation, escalating starvation, disease, crime and mortality rates, resulting in massive emigration from the country.
Hyperinflation in Venezuela is the currency instability in Venezuela that began in 2016 during the country's ongoing socioeconomic and political crisis. Venezuela began experiencing continuous and uninterrupted inflation in 1983, with double-digit annual inflation rates. Inflation rates became the highest in the world by 2014 under Nicolás Maduro, and continued to increase in the following years, with inflation exceeding 1,000,000% by 2018. In comparison to previous hyperinflationary episodes, the ongoing hyperinflation crisis is more severe than those of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Peru in the 1980s and 1990s, and that of Zimbabwe in the late-2000s.
Gaston Gelos is a German-Uruguayan economist. He joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1998 and has served as the Assistant Director of the Western Hemisphere Department since October 2022, where he was the Mission chief for Mexico.
... se le considera el artífice intelectual del Banco del Sur, un proyecto impulsado por el presidente venezolano ... Segun fuentes cercanas, el propio Chavez consulta con cierta frecuencia a Weisbrot, aunque no siempre seguiría sus consejos. (He is considered the intellectual architect of the Bank of the South, a project initiated by the Venezuelan president ... according to sources close to him, Chavez himself consults Weisbrot with some regularity, although he may not always follow his advice.)
Mark Weisbrot, artífice intelectual del Banco del Sur (Mark Weisbrot, intellectual architect of the Bank of the South)
Mark Weisbrot, artífice intelectual de la propuesta del Banco del Sur (Mark Weisbrot, intellectual author of the proposal of the Bank of the South)
sus promotores - Mark Weisbrot, artífice intelectual de la propuesta (its promoters - Mark Weisbrot, intellectual architect of the proposal)
Although an initial document for the establishment of the bank was signed in December 2007, it took another two years to finalize the agreement creating it. Among the controversial points was the question of voting rights ... The Bank of the South project, however, remains paralyzed six years after its ratification ... as of this writing in February 2016, the Bank of the South is still not capitalized ...
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Mark Weisbrot, a Washington-based economist who is broadly supportive of Mr. Chávez's economic policies, ...
... Weisbrot, who has supported Chavez's policies.
Some analysts supportive of Chávez's policies, like Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington ...