Okay. Hello and welcome, everybody, to the SOAS Economics webinar series called Intensifying Inequalities and Limitations of Global Capitalism. My name is Tobias Franz. I'm a lecturer in Economics at SOAS. Just before we begin with today's webinar that is part of this webinar series that has been organized by the Economics Department, just a quick disclaimer. Besides the SUE meeting, which is recorded, we also are streaming live. So for all of you who have friends and relatives without a Zoom account, please send them this Facebook link that I just shared in the chat and shared widely with everybody. And yeah, so this is some of the disclaimers from the beginning. I'm very excited to introduce and share today's webinar, which is launching the Canadian Journal of Development Studies special issue, which is entitled COVID-19 and Crises of Capitalism, Intensifying Inequalities and Global Responses. The special issue, which is guest edited by colleagues at the SOAS Economics Department, will be freely available for everybody who is intending today. So if you do want access and you have colleagues or friends who also want access, free access to this special issue, please make sure to fill in the Google form that I also now send around. Ansara also sent sent around again and leave your details there. So Rutledge, the publisher of the special issue and of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies will be able to send you a copy of that entire special issue with all of the 17 contributions in it. So yeah, around 12 or no, 11 months ago when the health, the economic, the political and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic became increasingly visible and dramatic across the world. My colleagues, Saras Devano, Janis Tafermos, Elisa van Weijenberg and myself, we had the idea of bringing together a collection of essays on the political economy of the pandemic and how it affects different aspects of our lives and of our economies of political issues, social issues and environmental issues across the world. We then approached Haroon Akram Lodi who is the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. He's also SOAS alumnus and a very good friend of the department who is also very interested in and supportive of our idea. So today is sort of the final day of this process and we're very pleased to also have Haroon here with us today who will start off talking about the significance of the special issue in this current context before Sada gives an introduction to the special overview and an overview of the different contributions in the special issue. Because we have, of course, have time limitations and constraints. Instead of having presentations of each of the 17 contributions, we will have five presentations from different contributors before we open the floor to everybody attending today for a Q&A session. Please do post your questions in the chat box below and also don't wait until the end before putting your questions to us because we will collect them and bring them then to the attention of the presenters at the very end of the sessions. So yeah, this, some of the housekeeping rules. And now without further ado, let me pass it on to Haroon. Haroon is a professor in economics and international development studies at Trent University in Petersburg, Canada. And he's also, as I said before, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. So Haroon, please. Thanks very much, Toby. I'd like to say a few words about the journal and then talk just for a couple of minutes about this special issue. So as you've been told, I'm the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, which is the Journal of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development, which is somewhat like the DSA in the UK with the exceptional fact that we have very few economists as members, making it somewhat different. The association runs a listserv as active on social media. We have an annual conference, which is held in the summer every year, have about 800, sorry, 250 members. And for any students that are watching, membership of the association brings with it a free subscription to the journal. And for students, I worked out a subscription rate about 10 years ago, which is actually very cheap for students both in the North and in the South. Now, the Canadian Journal of Development Studies is not so well known in the UK, although there are some people that know it reasonably well. It's in its 41st year of publication. And over the course of the last 10 years, when it's been edited by myself and by John Harris, who's very well known to many of you, there's been a concerted effort to make it far more visible within Development Studies publications, in particular by stressing its interdisciplinarity and manifestly refusing to publish monodisciplinary articles. And we've been rewarded by seeing our impact factor rise quite dramatically. One of the most notable things about the journal is that we have far and away the largest share of women on the editorial board of any Development Studies journal. And that's important to us because it reflects the composition of this field. And also we have, apparently, I've been told by people who do the metrics, the largest share of publications from people in the global south of any of the major Development Studies journals, which of course is also important to us. So on the 29th of April last year, I received this email from Elisa, Sarah, Toby, and Yanis asking if we'd be interested in a special issue on COVID-19 and the crisis of capitalism. And I have to say it was like receiving mana from heaven. Because, I mean, this, as an editor, this is exactly what you want to get. You're living through a pandemic. Other journals are producing things very quickly. And then these four exceptional academics say, do you want this from us? Of course, I said yes. But I also thought that the Canadian Journal of Development Studies was the ideal home for the journal because of our resolute interdisciplinarity. And I'm very pleased that it's taken really from that first email. It's only been 46 weeks until we've reached this point. And the journal itself, as Toby said, will be published as a double issue in the next two weeks. And I do encourage those of you who can't have access to it to sign the Google form that's circulating so that you can get free access to the journal. Now, what can I say then about the place of this particular special issue?  And it's, in each of us in many different ways, it has stretched us. It's fundamentally transformed our lives. And it's transformed our field, the field of development studies. It is, you know, certainly over the course of my lifetime, a world historical event in terms of thinking about problems, processes of development. And over the course of the last year, we've seen many scholarly journals in the field produce very quickly special issues on COVID-19. But none of those special issues have adopted a political economy analysis in trying to understand the contours and dynamics of this pandemic. And this I think is extraordinarily important, because I'm strongly of the view that only by using a political economy analysis can we get a full, a fuller understanding of the ramifications of what has transpired to all of us over the course of the past year. And the multifaceted way upon which it has impacted all of us individually and collectively. One of the things that I say repeatedly is that the COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the global care crisis that we all live through on a daily basis. We've seen how the COVID-19 pandemic reflects a crisis in global agriculture, which is what I work on. But in a whole range of other areas, which are very well represented in this special issue, the pandemic is filtering through and refracting processes of change in ways that are unique and which really require an unveiling, a revelation, so that we can better understand how this pandemic is affecting us. So I'm really, really pleased that we've been able to get this to you so quickly. And I really want to congratulate Sarah, Elisa, Toby, and Yanis for the extraordinarily hard work that they've put in in bringing this together so professionally and so quickly. So thanks very much. Thank you very much, Avoun. And now also to give a bit of context to the special issue and about this political economy analysis and the interdisciplinarity that we were very much looking for. When we started this process, Sarah will give a quick overview and presentation of the special issue. And Sarah, as I said before, is a lecturer in economics at our department at SOAS as well. Thank you so much, Tobias, for the introduction and for chairing all of these. And thank you so much to Haroun also for the kind words and the warm words towards this special issue. So I mean, it is clear to all of us that we are living through a dramatic crisis that has been causing much human suffering and death for over a year now. And the magnitude of this crisis, as well as its immediate impacts on everyday life, invoked the urge to make sense somehow and to analyze the profound transformations that have been occurring around us since the beginning of the pandemic. So in a way, I think it is this sense of urge that brought Elisa Tobias, Yanis and myself together around the idea of working towards a collection of contributions on the COVID-19 crisis. And here I would like to briefly extend our thanks on behalf of all of the guest editors, to all of the contributors to the special issue, and to the people at the Canadian Journal of Development Studies who've worked with us very effectively to put this together. I mean, clearly the special issue is here thanks to all of you. And we are very grateful for all of your work on this. And on a more personal note, I also would like to thank my fellow guest editors, because it has been very important to me to have this project to occupy my mind during this challenging year. And indeed, I am tasked with giving you this overview to the special issue. But this is really the result of true collective work. And this is something that I am very proud of. So thank you, Tobias, Yanis and Elisa for this. So let me tell you a bit about the special issue. So the collection provides some early analysis, I think we can still call it early, of a phenomenon that is evolving. And the contributions focus on key transformations that have occurred in the first six to 12 months from the beginning of the pandemic. In doing so, our issue joins the progressive scholarship that understands these prizes as intrinsic to the workings of 21st century global capitalism. What our issue adds to this progressive scholarship are two important dimensions that Haroun has touched upon, a global south lens and an interdisciplinary lens with interdisciplinary work from across the social sciences with a specific focus on political economy. So the global south lens is absolutely critical to see how this crisis intervenes on preexisting fault lines and fragilities. In fact, it is true that some countries have been more successful at managing the health crisis than others in ways that clearly escape those typical device between foreign rich countries or between the global south and the global north. And indeed, there are important lessons to be learned from the experience of these countries. However, we think that such unevenness in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic does not take away from the perpetuation of structural divides between the global south and the global north. Race, class and gender inequalities both within countries and cutting across the national boundaries on a global scale have clearly intensified during the COVID-19 crisis so far. In this sense, in our introduction piece, we argue that COVID-19 acts as a magnifying glass through which we have been able to see the depth of multiple and intersecting inequalities. So they are not just a qualification of contemporary global capitalism, but they are right at the core of how contemporary global capitalism works. And indeed, what we're seeing in terms of vaccine inequality adds another layer of inequality with potentially severe long lasting implications so that we should reflect on. So in a way, the COVID-19 crisis is an indictment of our economies and societies. But an important question is whether this crisis also represents an opportunity for change. So for example, we have seen how state intervention has challenged imaginaries that were prevailing until very recently in terms of what states can do. However, also here we must note how the so-called magic monetary has grown rapidly in some countries, but not at all in others. And our analysis indicates that the responses to the COVID-19 crisis so far on the whole do not alter pre-crisis configurations of power. And in fact, the structural divides in terms of uneven trade relations, the transfer of costs onto the workers in the most precarious occupations, and the global financial architecture that altogether put the global south in overall conditions of material fragility and subordination are all intact, if not exacerbated at this point in time. And these are all themes that are central in our special issue as it will become clear in a moment when I provide to you the table of content and the key themes so that the special issue deals with that. I would also like to note that an important cross-cutting theme in the special issue is that of social reproduction, and Harold mentioned the crisis of care. A social reproduction lens, so we believe, is necessary to both gain a more complete understanding of capitalism and also to capture the multiple inequalities that I have been referring to. And so the contributions that take this lens to various contexts have been very important to our special issue. And finally, of course, Hazaron was saying an interdisciplinary lens is absolutely imperative in the context of a crisis that cannot be fully understood within disciplinary silos. Richard Houghton, who is the editor of the Lancet, has defined this crisis as a syndemic rather than a pandemic to point to how this crisis is characterized or this pandemic is characterized by both biological and social interactions. So our special issue shows how interdisciplinary engagement within the social sciences does offer critical perspective to understand the social, economic and political dimensions of this syndemic. And I think we should add that heterodox economics and critical political economy are much better placed to engage in this interdisciplinary dialogue across the social sciences than mainstream economics is. So in the couple of minutes that I have left, I hope, I'm going to quickly share my screen to show you just a few slides that should give you a better understanding of what is included in our special issue and the different themes that we touch upon and how the presentations that will follow fit into this overall collection. So of course, there is an introductory piece that we have been that I have been referring to, and we have identified five key themes so that the special issue feels way. So on the first theme, the origins of the crisis in the food system and in the health sector and system, we have four papers, two of which look at the food system and two of which look at health issues. And so the papers that you see marked with a star are those on which we're going to have a presentation following my own. On the second theme, which is the role of the state, and we have three contributions so that look at the role of the state from different angles and across three different contexts. Then we have a third theme, which is that of commodity and of course the reliance of many countries in the global south, the expo of primary commodities. We have a more general paper looking at global oil markets and then two papers looking at the implications of the COVID-19 crisis on commodity exporting economies in the global south. Then we have another three papers on the theme of work. Two of them look at India from different and complementary angles, and another one looks at the issue of essential work. And finally, the theme of global finance, with three contributions looking at the debt crisis in low-income countries, the role of the World Bank and the type of institutional response that we could expect in the context of the COVID-19 crisis and what kind of implications that these bear for addressing the climate crisis, which is of course the other important crisis so we are facing. So this is where I end and hand over back to Tobiasa. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Sarah, for this very good framing of the different contributions and of our special issue more generally. So let me pass it on to the speakers that speak on this first issue that you say we identified in terms of health and food crisis. And this is the contribution by Camila Gianella and colleagues. Camila is the Executive Director of CISEPA at the Contifisia Universidad Catolica del Perú and Maria Jose Romero, who's a PhD candidate in Development Economics at SOAS. And their paper asked why does COVID, what does COVID-19 tell us about the Peruvian health system? So yeah, over to you, Camila and Maria Jose. Thank you. We are in the chair of a presentation that Maria is going to help me because my connection is so so. Thank you for the opportunity to present our work. I think that you have a lot of contribution and it's difficult to select the papers. Our article is focusing in the case of Peru and what we were asking is what is going on in Peru, how to explain the huge impact of COVID in a country that's supposed to be in good shape before the pandemic. So as some of you know, Maria Jose, this is not the presentation, it's like a paper while we are here. But I can continue. As some of you know, Peru in the region in Latin America is an upper middle country. It's a country that has been in constant unstable growth over the mean of the region. And in terms of development indicators, the country was in a good performance in health indicators. So on the related with maternal health mortality, child mortality, tuberculosis, universal health care, Peru was supposedly on track. And despite of this, the country is one of the countries in the region and in the world with the highest mortality rates related to COVID, but also with high excess deaths in the 2020. So how we try to analyze what is this relief from the Peruvian health system. Maria Jose, thanks. What we say is like there has been a lot of explanation when we speak about with public health practitioners and data say, yeah, well, you know, there is some things that you have to understand. There is an overload on the health system. There's also the things of the political commitment. But in Peru, you have the political commitment in the beginning was not the situation that we saw in Brazil or Nicaragua. The government say, okay, lockdown and we were super fast on implementing that. There is also a situation of structural exclusion and individual characteristics. But what do we say in the paper that you have to, that is true that you have to see all these things. But also we need to understand that how global health priorities have been shaped has also had an impact on the health system. So this understanding of health on this kind of really focusing indicators has not shaped to strengthen the health system to make it possible to provide and to guarantee access to health care for the people. And that also explains the impact, but also the global economic policies and the promotion of, for example, the public partnerships and how the private system has been involved on the Peruvian health system has created a lot of distortions on the access to drugs, oxygen, and that also explains why people have been dying in Peru in that rate. So in the paper, we try to review this and to find some explanations to give another understanding and to complement the understanding of what is going on in Peru and why we are still in this awful situation with a lot of deaths, with a steam emergency situation, with some kind of lockdown across the country. Next one. So what we say is, as I say, that when we try to go deeper in the global health policies and say, okay, and this is not new, there are other authors that have been saying this, that is an increased promotion of these indicators, this measurement obsession that doesn't really mean access to health care. And we go in the case of Peru with maternal deaths. And next one, what we know now is, for example, that Peru has gone back five years on maternal deaths, that's only in 2010, 2020. So that is a huge impact of the current situation of the COVID. This is a situation that is not the same in all the regions, it's not the same in all the countries. It's not just to understand this in terms of the pressure of the pandemic on the health system. It also has to say something about how the health system has been organized to provide some indicators and to show a good performance. I feel like I'm going to leave that and then Maria Jose can continue. Thank you, Camila, and thank you, everyone, mostly the editors for the invitation to contribute to the journal. I will take the presentation from the point that Camila mentioned on global health policies, also with regard to the framing that the Sustainable Development Goals puts into countries when it comes to achieving the SDGs. And in particular, the SDGs also includes SDG 17, that is the one that goes into the means of implementation of the whole set of goals. And it's the one that also promotes heavily the use of public-private partnerships for the achievements of the goals. And this promotion going on at this point at the global level translates into concrete practices at the regional and at the national level that has a proceed with little regard to the underlying conditions and the cost under which it is secure. There is ambiguous evidence of the positive development impact of PPPs, as we will see. In the case of Peru, this has been evident by the fact that the World Bank Group, the Inter-American Development Bank, has also promoted the use of public-private partnership for health care. The promotion of PPPs can be seen in the case of Peru in the implementation of two concrete PPP hospitals that has been ongoing since 2014. But also in the fact that there is a pipeline of PPP projects that get the attention of the government and of regional authorities as well. There are five PPP hospitals under negotiation and most of the official plans are focused on that. And the implementation of these PPP hospitals rests on the assumption that the state has the capacity to regulate in the public interest, which has clearly been challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic. And in both cases that are currently under implementation, we see that there are consortiums led by Spanish multinational companies, the ones that are implementing these projects. And we could clearly see from the experience of Spain and other countries in the north that this is a model very controversial. And we also analyzed in our article how these policies being implemented at the global level, but also at the national level intersect with some of the main features of the Peruvian health system. And Camila will go into the details of that, but for us it was very important to analyze how a system that is highly fragmented and segmented is the one that has the capacity to deal with a pandemic like the one that we are suffering. Thank you. Over to you Camila. Thanks Camila. Camila, Maria Jose, could you wrap up please to do some constraints. Thank you. Yeah, just to cross is that as I said before like this is a table that shows that we have the idea that before the pandemic these regions were in good shape to provide health services and provide health care and that is not the case. And in the context of Peruvian and I think in Latin America despite this evidence there is still there's not much reflection so I think that is good to have these spaces to reflect on this. And there is no more reflection on the need to have the private sector involved even in vaccine. So there's a huge discussion now on the vaccination that is not part of the article but I think it's also how this has been continued. So the boost and the promotion of the private sector in the public health is making with a lack of reflections as Maria Jose said lack of evidence and that and what we see in this and also there is a lack of reflection on how we are shaping the health system with these kind of indicators that as the Peruvian case shows there are not enough to to guarantee health care access to the to the population and I think that is what we can finish there. Thank you. Thank you very much Camila and Maria Jose and we stay in Latin America which is but we now go to the next theme that Sarah mentioned at the beginning which is the theme of the role of the state and here we have Lena Lavinas who is a professor of welfare economics at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro and also visiting Liverpool and professor at SOAS and she talks about Latin America at the crossroads yet again what income policies in the post-pandemic era is the question that she poses in her article and let me give it over to you Lena. Thank you so I'd like to thank you for the introduction also I'd like to thank all the editors for inviting me to be part of the special issue in special I'd like to thank Lisa and finally I'd like to say that I'm pleased to be here with all of you even though we are meeting virtually it's great to be here so I was asked to talk about the role of the state it's not entirely more the topic I have listed in my paper but anyway check I suppose you can see it can you see my presentation yes thanks so very quickly as you probably all know no other region in the world has been as severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic as Latin America according to different sources of 15 countries with the highest deaths per capita in September 11 were Latin American countries so when the pandemic struck Latin America was recovering from a five-year low growth period and of course we have been then even in the worst situation after the pandemic outbreak because now according to ECLAC we're going to have a economic growth rate a negative economic growth rate by 7.7 percent for last year so when the pandemic struck it reached a region where which is characterized by underfunded public health care systems as we have just seen in the previous presentations access highly segmented by income one third of all health care expenses are out of pocket we put of course the population always in risk because you don't know how much you're going to spend and of course this is also a dynamic that increase levels of indebtedness for Latin American households and one of the main characteristics of the region is that it has never reached a universal courage coverage of social risks at the same time the main let's say cash transfers as you know also make up the bulk of social policy in Latin America conditional cash transfers they become this flex sheet programs in Latin America they have been exported as a great achievement of Latin American countries they prevailed over the 2000s as the main feature of Latin American social provisions which were largely insufficient and today one fifth of Latin Americans are welfare recipients which is pretty large but the the budget the national in average the regional DDP committed to this welfare schemes is very low it's around 0.37% of the regional DDP and since 2013 with the end of the commodity boom of course we have take-up rates that are falling due to cutbacks in social policies so during the pandemic we witnessed a huge job destruction especially in the informal sector as you know it's it varies it ranges between 15-80% of the whole Latin American labor markets and this provoked an increase in poverty rates so according again to ECLA 45.4 million people fell below the poverty line they fell into poverty in the last year which is more than one third of the population 230 million people and 100 million living in extreme poverty so what did the state do in Latin American general not only Latin America if you look with the United States to the UK not so much to France but in other countries as well the COVID-19 policies response was mainly providing unemployment and welfare direct payments in order to reduce the impact of loss of income in most Latin American households so 80% of all relief programs in Latin America again according to ECLA consisted of expanding income transfers but the main characteristic of these programs like in the United States in the UK they were ad hoc programs temporary programs but the novelty is that they reached unprecedented scale and value so they became much more generous towards the poor informal workers and the self-employed so one of the main characteristics of these programs is that for the first time they reached a larger public people that usually were not covered because either they were not they did not contribute to the formal social protection system so they could not receive unemployment benefits on the other side they were not poor enough to become welfare recipients so this time they were also covered by this very let's say generous programs they offered higher benefits sometimes two or three times higher than welfare benefits like it's the case in Brazil and also but also they preserved eligibility criteria they were in test but with the poverty cut off higher so we could cover more people because we reduce the caps that maintained the poverty threshold threshold very low in our countries but the other novelty also is that most of the time we waived conditionalities and this is also characteristic that is being generalized in most conditional cash transfers in cash transfers worldwide which are not really now a characterized market by conditionalities so there are two countries from which I can speak a bit more Argentine and Brazil same model emergency cash transfers Brazil has adopted a civil emergencia which is what we have called an emergency basic income program 120 dollars per month for five months and then we have we have the benefit and it it was it came down to 60 dollars per month to 60 67.2 million people and we double the benefit value to loan mothers for loan mothers so for the first time well for recipients in Brazil especially loan mothers full loan mothers they received six times the value of welfare benefit in Brazil so it was really there was a huge impact in Argentina we had to say with ingresso familiar and the emergency which reached 11 million recipients also with a fixed value benefit of 100 dollars and they also increased they also offered an extraordinary bonus to 20 million families 20 million people that were already recipients of the assimilation universal. So what are the preliminary findings and I will wrap up here so of course because those emergency cash transfers were very generous with values that either topped or even exceeded average benefits either contributory or non-contributory in Latin America we could reduce the impact of the coronavirus crisis and the increase in the index will be much lower around 2.9 percent in average instead of 5.6 percent like act like expected last year with their preliminary estimates but of course in the second year of COVID-19 those adult measures are either being scaled down or suppressed and well for benefits are again returning to their pre-pandemic levels poverty threshold have not been revalued so there again remain the same as prior to the pandemic which means that we want to really maintain the cap very low and unemployment benefits also were not redesigned to improve their coverage so as we know because of our level of informality most workers in Latin America they are not eligible for unemployment benefits and of course there was a huge flood of cash that instead of reinforcing welfare institutions which remain incomplete weak underfunded what we have done was to transfer cash to a huge number of families which was of course important but it doesn't really address our structural problems in terms of improving social protection systems in Latin America so why did this happen I have some assumptions one is is this a way of preventing post-crisis trajectories from reinforcing social and economic rights making it easier to impose no round of austerity once the worst of the COVID-19 crisis is passed so this is my feeling my feeling is that we need instead of focusing on improving and addressing our structural problems and reinforce the institutions our welfare institutions that remain that continue to exist but that suffer from under financing what the states prefer to do was to choose this path which is a parallel path implement temporary ad hoc programs and then in the end when it's finished you just go back you just return to normalcy and of course I think that we want to see a move in terms of restoring ill equipped public health care systems we'll continue to see a mishandling in the vaccine rollout but not only and in the end we want to see a revamp of social policies to make them much more effective and contribute making them contribute to really reduce those deep inequalities we have in Latin America many thanks thank you very much Lena and very interesting especially the point regarding the ineffectiveness of any kind of cash transfer if remains an underfunded health and social system in as part of responsibilities of the state so on to the next block and as you know Sada also mentioned this crisis as a simultaneously demand and supply crisis has had severe impacts especially on commodity prices and with a lot of countries in the global south depending on the export of commodities that has particularly affected those countries that do extract and export commodities so on to the next block where Nana Ama Asante Poku and Sophie van Hullen wrote a paper about these vulnerabilities of commodity exporters in the times of COVID-19 and analyze the case of Ghana and Nana will present Nana as a research fellow at the Institute of Statistic and Social Economic Research at the University of Ghana. Hello good evening everyone thank you for the opportunity to have this presentation and so as has already been introduced I will be talking on the topic of commodity exporters vulnerabilities in times of COVID-19 and we're looking at the case of Ghana so the outline for this presentation I'll just do an introduction tell you the research question methodology gave you Ghana's experience, implications, recommendations and the conclusion so COVID-19 has been a health crisis health and economic crisis for all economies but especially for commodity dependent economies it's been an economic crisis these commodity dependent economies actually generate over 80 percent of the revenues from commodities and in the case of Ghana three commodities gold, cocoa and oil make up over 80 percent of this revenue. Ghana is the second largest producer of cocoa in the world and it's Africa's largest gold exporter. What happens is that these revenues are a great source of finance for states and governments to carry out their development objectives and commodity dependent economies are not they are not new to global crisis but then the COVID-19 crisis is unique in the sense that it is both a simultaneous demand and supply shock and then the size and the speed of the demand shock has been unprecedented. So we we built on three channels that UNTAC has identified as being the channels through which commodity dependent economies are affected and the price channel a supply chain channel and then a finance a financial channel. The price channel basically refers to drastic declines in commodity prices the supply chain channel refers to disruptions in global supply chains and then the financial channel refers to the activities of financial investors and also so that financial investors resulting in prosciptical capital flows and debt servicing. What you realize is that the commodity price is one of the key or the most significant channels through which the COVID-19 crisis impacts the commodity dependent economies. Commodity prices are determined by demand and supply changes and there's been drastic demand changes affecting these three commodities that I just mentioned gold, cocoa and oil and also we have financial investors who are in the commodity market and their actions may actually increase the volatility of price changes in the market. What we have is that these changes then have implications for the revenue streams it has implications for the physical space it has implications for debt servicing for foreign exchange it basically has implications for the macroeconomic stability of the country. So for the three commodities I'm talking about I'll just give you a few highlights of what has happened in those markets during the COVID-19 situation and this is as was mentioned earlier this was done in the early days of the pandemic so much of this was up to like September or October 2020. We had oil having a drastic decline in prices and also a decline in demand basically because travel was halted people were working from home lockdowns had people working from home so the strategy is used by countries to mitigate the or to keep the spread of COVID-19 actually resulted in some demand and supply shocks to commodity for gold cocoa we had a decline in demand cocoa is a luxury is a luxury product at the end of the day because this used to produce chocolate and chocolate is a luxury product and chocolate much much of chocolate is eaten or produced and eaten in the western in the western hemisphere the western world. Europe has a large a large amount of demand for cocoa for chocolate and that's where cocoa is used to produce chocolate. We had a large decline in the price and there is a possibility of a continued decline in the price of cocoa as grinding falls in the EU and then for gold gold had a good a good run during the COVID-19 crisis gold is a as a store of wealth so most people went and bought gold so there was increasing gold prices there was increasing the demand for gold but at the same time there was a decline in jewelry demand so that kind of stabilized had an effect on on how high the demand went. So for our research question we were looking at how resilient garnish revenue and physical space is with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic and pre-COVID-19 the global situation was that those global trade was already declining commodity prices were already low for the national situation we already had increasing government debt exchange wage depreciation and then increase in non-concession up or in Ghana is now a middle in a lower middle income country so access to concession up loans are limited or restricted. So we looked at and we adapted methodology since commodity prices is one of the most significant ways through which the the impact of COVID-19 has transmitted on to on to commodity dependent countries we adapted supply chain analysis and the commodity price analysis but then what we did then was to put together and look at the supply chain in terms of a complex adaptive system and what we what we mean by that is that in the in the in the supply chain there are different actors there are governments they are multinational companies they are financial investors they are even the cocoa farmers and each one of these stakeholders have their own mechanisms for for dealing with with the effects of the crisis but at the same time they need each other so even though they have their symmetries in how best they can deal with the impacts of COVID-19 they all do need to work together and the resilience of one actor may impede the resilience of the other or at the same time the resilience of one may actually bring up the resilience of the other what we did we we did because it was a this was in the beginning at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis we looked at the short-term impact so we just looked at the impact of the crisis on the Ghanaian state and and its interactions with the other actors we didn't go lower down the chain so Ghana's experience for supply we realized that there was there was no disruption in in in the production of gold cocoa or oil production went on as usual and this is because the areas in which gold oil and oil are actually produced were not hard hit by by COVID-19 actually Ghana relatively was not hard hit by COVID-19 and we had just three three weeks of lockdown so and these producing areas were not necessarily in the areas that were under lockdown so production went on as usual but the way you realize was that there were disruptions in services and in input provision so there were disruptions in cocoa spraying and in fertilizer programs and then also the amount of cocoa that was exported that was taken to the pot was lower in comparison with training with 19 and then as time goes on it is expected that continued lower prices would have an impact on future investments for these for these commodities specific to Ghana the implications of both the a combination of the national or the domestic situation and what was happening at the international level meant that Ghana had decreased access to foreign exchange Ghana uses what is called the cocoa syndicate loan to acquire funding for some of its development food programs and this is like a this is a 1.3 billion loan what Ghana does is it sells forward about 70 percent of its predicted crop cocoa crop and then uses this money to finance its need and what we had was that international lenders were hesitant to underwrite this 1.3 billion loan and as a result of that of that local farmers where there were delays in having pain farmers finally Ghana did secure secure the loan using a combination of international and local banks and so was able to go ahead and get some funding but also realize that as a result of the crisis there's been an increase in government debt and it's two ways because government has had to borrow to finance its its its expenditures and at the same at the same time the revenue that it's receiving is lower and then there's also been a decreased access to credit could I please ask you to wrap up okay decreased access to credit and then lastly there's also been a restricted fiscal space the Ghana has had to withdraw some money from its sovereign world funds and then it's also now has an increased debt servicing because one because it's where it ratings has gone down and this then means that there's a reduced ability to invest for future economic growth and so what the country would have to do is to consider diversifying its economy in the long term thank you thank you very much and sorry for rushing you a little bit but we have two more presentations to come we move now to the the theme related to work and here should be and should be case our and colleagues wrote about the impact of COVID-19 on livelihoods in India. Surbhi is an assistant professor in economics at the school of arts and sciences at Asim Premji University in Bengaluru and yeah she will present on behalf of her and her colleagues. Thanks a lot and all the editors for this special issue I'm very excited to be here. So today I'm going to be talking about the paper pandemic informality and vulnerability in fact of COVID-19 on livelihoods in India it is a co-authored work with Rosa Abraham who is on the Zoom meeting today and as with all other works a team of researchers and of course the respondents who responded to our survey so let me begin by basically pointing out that Indian economy has experienced high economic growth for nearly three decades however despite that a vast majority of its working population derives livelihoods from the informal economy. Now this persistence of informality of course have been studied in various mainstream as well as heterodox strands but one common feature in all these strands has been this expectation of a transformation and a capitalist transition with growth. A recent strand of literature following Kalyan Sarnal characterizing the post-colonial development process or rather the post-colonial capitalism talks about that the process of growth in these economies is in fact exclusionary nature wherein formalities not due to a lack of growth but rather is an outcome of it and I will come back to this towards the end of my presentation. Now in India even as agriculture shed labor the high productivity formal sectors fail to create jobs in keeping with this increased labor supply further there has been an increased informalization and precaritization of jobs even within the formal sector thereby you know contributing to the overall high levels of informality of the Indian workforce. Informal employment as we know is marked by low earnings precarious working conditions weak or absent social protection and at the extreme independence on day-to-day earnings for sustenance. Now it has been widely documented in the literature and what you know you've been talking about in terms of this special issue that the impact of pandemic has mostly been along the lines of some pre-existing vulnerabilities. The informal economy in the Indian context represents the crucial site of these economic vulnerabilities in fact not just economic but rather also an overlap with various social vulnerabilities as well. Now for such a large country in the presence of such high informality with insecure jobs in absence of long-term contracts when the economic activities are disrupted due to an economic lockdown when the pandemic spread to India which was one of the most stringent lockdowns in the world with a four hours notice by the way it isn't really unexpected that there would be a large-scale loss of jobs and earnings in addition given that there's a lack of or I mean there's a lack of adequate social security measures this loss soon in fact translated into livelihood insecurity and hunger and indebted. Well the impact of pandemic is not entirely unexpected but what this forces us is to think about the nature of development trajectory which despite you know of being associated with high economic growth has not translated into secure jobs for a vast majority of the population. With these broad structural vulnerabilities in mind in order to evaluate this impact we conducted a phone survey in the middle of the pandemic of around 5,000 workers to whom we are eternally grateful for giving us the time especially during such a hard you know time that they were going through and these were workers belonging mainly to vulnerable households with income a little below or equivalent to the median income of the country and working mainly in informal works across 12 states in India and for this we collaborated with civil society organizations who were closely engaged with these workers. Now a broad snapshot of the results and of course in the paper we detailed this out but I just want to give some key findings here what we find is that around two-thirds of the workforce in our sample lost employment during the lockdown with the impact being much more severe in the urban areas. If we exclude the farmers out three-fourth of you know workers suffered a loss in employment those who were self-employed in agriculture were in fact the least impacted because you know there's not really a concept of losing employment so much when you're working in agriculture because you're telling your own piece of land. The urban self-employed were the worst impacted with nearly 90 percent of their respondents in our sample losing employment. Agriculture self-employment in many ways happened to be a fallback option for the retrenched workers. Women were slightly more impacted than men in terms of loss in employment. Muslims which is a minority in the country were again slightly more likely to lose jobs than Hindus. There was in fact not much caste based difference caste as a social I mean caste of Indian economy is socially you know it is a line in a social hierarchy along the caste lines but the difference that we're not seeing at least in the caste lines is probably because of you know some distress driven sort of work that they were forced to do or in over representation in certain essential services. Other than that you know as expected health and education sector were in fact less impacted relative to other sectors of the economy. But along with this what really happened was that there was a translation of this loss in employment expectively to earning loss and across employment types and social identities earnings fell by an enormous margin of 40 to 50 percent. In fact even the regular salaried work which is supposedly more secure 48 percent of the regular salaried workers reported not having received any salary or reduced salary during the lockdown period and mind you the lockdown in India lasted for a little over 60 days. Although 60 percent of respondents in agriculture and light sectors had some produce to sell but an overwhelming majority of it could not sell any of their harvest. Now overall you know it's we see this sort of impact across different employment categories for men women though there's some difference but what really seems to be happening is that even for the relatively more secure jobs given the you know extent of precarity in the workforce there seems to be an impact which is across the board. The crisis seems to have acted along the fault lines of informality and has an effect of leveling down of livelihoods across the board for this vulnerable population. This as expected in the absence of social security nets soon translated into you know various livelihood and securities. For example 80 percent of our respondents from from different households said that they were consuming less food than before. Around 47 percent people said that they did not have even enough money to buy a week's worth of essential. Thirty six percent took loans to cover their expenses during the lockdown and of the people staying on rented accommodation 85 percent said that they did not have enough money to buy to even pay the next month's rent. And you know it was this insecurity was a little less for especially the food insecurity for former households but given that so many proportion of population had to reduce their food intake we can imagine the mammoth amount of you know what this really entails. Now coming to the last part of the discussion I'll just take a couple more minutes where the idea is that there's two characteristic features of the Indian economy the predominantly informal nature and the critically low investment in social state funded social security nets which appear to have played an important role to produce such an acute impact. Now the informal nature of job absolves the labor the employer of any legal responsibility but of course if the state steps in the amount of impact this would have put to some extent be mitigated. But in India not only was this state support really thin in fact one of the programs that were the best was in kind support of food but despite that there was a huge food insecurity that we just talked about for almost half of the vulnerable population reported not having received any cash transferred with snowballed into this mammoth impact that we are talking about. Now lockdown has lifted people are coming back and there's some recovery in the economy that we are seeing but what you know another or some of our other ongoing works what we're showing is that there's this huge move towards informality even more than what it existed earlier. In that context you know one could think about these policy measures for example better social security measures which is provided by the state scaling up of enterprises in order to improve formalization enforcing labor laws so that they better collective bargaining mechanisms even if the labor market is not very tight. However we are dealing with a bigger question here the scale of this COVID crisis is presenting this radical opportunity to rethink the current development trajectory and it's radical in two ways on on one hand one is asking about whether there's a possibility of the Indian economy to undergo a successful structural transformation under the current growth process which as I was talking about Sun Nels analysis in the recent you know period talks about that this this sort of informality is an outcome of the growth process where the ongoing growth process transfers resources from subsistence driven traditional segments to the modern you know growth driven sector where the population in these traditional segments is not absorbed in the modern formal sector. Now this excluded population is then forced to reproduce the conditions of livelihood in the informal economy therefore it raises questions about the possibility of the current development and growth trajectory delivering a transformation but on the other hand the last point that I want to make is that even if such a transformation were possible given the proliferation of informality even in the most advanced and the developed economies of the world the conjuncture also posits the need to critically reassess the limits of an already transformed economy or an ordered economy already undergone a transition to provide secured employment to its population under the current trajectory of global capital. Thank you. Thank you very much Solbi and now for our last presentation we have Cristina Lascarides. Cristina is election economics at the Open University here in the United Kingdom and she in her contribution talks about COVID-19 and the debt crisis in low and middle income countries as this current crisis of course has large remunifications for countries and their debt issues so Cristina. Thank you very much can you hear me okay great okay I'm just going to share my screen just give me one second so hopefully you can see that screen okay yes okay great so I first want to thank everybody for putting this amazing event on and for pulling this together it's a real honor to be part of this special issue and also to be part of the launch so thank you very very much and I want to introduce some key elements in my paper called when push came to show COVID-19 and debt crisis in low income countries and I just want to start by pointing out two big sort of background points and the paper built on one big important background point maybe pre-pandemic point is the fact that the concerns for the potential of a debt crisis has been growing and mounting in recent years and it's precipitated a very big discussion on the looming debt crisis on new debt traps and growing vulnerabilities and that discussion has really picked up speed since 2015-2016 onwards by key institutions such as many unktads been picking this up but also the IMF and it's generated a lot of sort of scholarship so the idea of a debt crisis coming has been sort of coming up the agenda for quite some time now and why have this how why has this been you know what's behind this there are several explanations one that I just want to mention here is it is very much about global inequalities and unequal financial integration to the global economy and that exposes countries to different types of dynamics and one that I've worked on with co-authors as well is this surge of global liquidity that is out of country's control but drives that dynamics in particular the cost of borrowing and ability to refinance and that whole story is linked to the US monetary policy the sort of global search for yield and the kind of outcome of that is the change in creditor landscape and increase of private sector participants in low income country borrowing so second big background point is well what happens what do we know about what happens when debt crises happen is when countries find themselves in debt repayment difficulties we know that they face an amalgam of creditor blood forums disparate legal environments they are litigated against in western countries courts they're forced to ban the development plans alongside contractionary IMF programs that are largely acknowledged as failing to restore sort of growth equitable growth even restore the debt problems and and that's led to this whole too little too late approach at great social cost to the data country so that's very well established from you know several decades of crises that we've seen so that sort of grounds the push bit of the paper and then come covid I sort of look at the shove and how the how covid has sort of precipitated a lot of these growing dynamics and accelerated the pace of these difficulties so there has been a growing number of default sovereign downgrades and the kind of largest capital outflow reversal ever recorded which has somewhat been restored but the paper tries to map a little bit of the global policy response to the debt issues mainly by the two institutions that have led that response so the IMF and the G20 and just some characteristics of that response is the IMF's focused mainly on increasing access to expensive loans a lot of the loans have gone to countries that are already in a very sort of precarious debt situation and even to the countries that are eligible for the second sort of pillar of the response which is the D20 the G20s program and the G20 program is sort of eligible for low income and least developed countries and it provides a sort of breathing space but the breathing space is very partial it's only on a certain portion of the country's external debt so they owe to bilateral creditors and it postpones the payments so there's no credit to loss and there's no real relief that's just due in a little bit further down the line so I kind of look at how what's the characteristic of the response to countries that are DSA are eligible but have also received IMF emergency financing so there's a bit of empirical work on that and the overarching point from that is that the response is very limited the sizes are negligible and in terms of loans and in terms of the grant financing especially the dear society even if implemented in full doesn't cover half the payments due in 2020 and it exacerbates this sort of aforementioned point about the fact that non-participating creditors their repayment gets eased through the setup because the IMF is anyway and so I just map that and then go on to some of the global discussion that came out since March on the global debt issue and I try and organize the the response to the debt issues and I've sort of as listed over here and so the the discussion that's really come out of the pandemic really focuses on how to get the private sector involved how to create legislation that can protect debtors from litigation there's been a whole host of market-based solutions sort of advocated as possible solutions to the crisis but there has been also cause for much greater creditor coordination and despite the efforts to suggest that there isn't sort of enough political dynamic for cancellation or sort of institutional approaches and there has been a very broad wide-ranging campaign not just in civil society but also in parliamentarians to push for the needed cancellation and to in sort of advocate for a kind of institutional approach and so the the paper picks up on one aspect of these critiques in particular which is really about the perils of loan approval processes at the IMF and I focus on one aspect of this critique to highlight how the DSA the debt sustainability analysis of the IMF and the World Bank sort of exacerbates these inequalities so I analyzed 40 of the approximately 40 of the loan approval documents that had come out in the first six months to just try and understand what on what basis were these loans made and sort of on what was the basis of this policy response so on the left hand side panel the overall we basically have the projected real GDP growth that underpins the loan approval process and they're all predicated on a very sharp v-shaped recovery with average growth of 2021 slightly higher than previous to the pandemic and on the right hand side we have the projected primary deficit underpinning the loan programs which are heavily predicated on a one-year sort of increased deficit spending and consolidation over the following years so I try and unpick some of the problems that are involved here and I basically suggest that the DSAs don't actually provide an adequate assessment of country's ability to repay and one of the so that some of the drivers of that dynamics in the DSA are of course the future growth rates the rate of future growth rates future rates of interest primary balances are the key sort of things that are highlighted in this sort of faulty framework and one of the things that's really striking is that the things that the interaction of these policies has really not been taken into account at all and not only is the future generally in the level of uncertainty is unprecedented and not only is the future impossible to kind of project but in this context as well how our assessments being made when it's so unclear what financing will be available and on what terms when you have the interaction of these the big increase of private sector borrowing being due over the next few years and the COVID IMF COVID lines being due over the next few years and the DSSI repayments the postponements being due over the next few years and likewise with the future with this predicted growth path these unrealistic growth assumptions that we know the IMF is very famous for not only is the impact still unraveling but there is sort of numerous there is a lot of evidence that the actual performance of growth in a deep crisis is dramatically worse than the IMF's projections so it's kind of laughable and the same with the assumption of austerity so from all of these very recent crises we know that austerity worsens worsens growth prospects and has devastating impacts on health inequality poverty and a bad track record of resolving debt repayment problems and there has been a call for stimulus across these institutions but that's been met by sort of underlying policies and assumptions that they will consolidate so reading the the loan approval documents you see that non priority what's called non priority infrastructural spending has already been identified to be curtailed so countries are getting an undue label of sustainability when development programs are already being curtailed in order to suit that framework so that's one point the second the other point about this is that this emergency loan financing is finite and once those access limits are reached then countries have to migrate to upper credit tranche programs their high conditionality programs which we know are also lots of evidence past work that's been done to show that those are responsible for a lot of the underfunded healthcare systems that you know ostensibly these programs are trying to sort of bolster so the kind of final point and kind of conclusion of the paper is to try and highlight that these points to problems that are beyond the difficulties of making future projections and that's really about the DSA as an inappropriate as being inappropriate by construction partly because it's a credit it's a credit a creative tool created to suit internal decision making needs and so rather so besides highlighting some of the overarching problems of the IMF and G20 response might I want to highlight that this DSA this loan approval process is part of the structural problem that was mentioned at the beginning because it enables sustainability labels to be applied unduly and that as a consequence is to underestimate the severity of a debt crisis and then to undermine the needed relief so coupled with this very unequal creditor-led system the the problems get exacerbated so as part of those kind of calls for for cancellation for the financing needs that are new the financing that's needed and the debt relief needs have been calculated umptad has been again sort of highlighting a lot of these issues and is the need to bring to the fore a series of alternatives which again have a very long history going back decades which bring to the kind of core of assessments either human rights framework development-centered approach so the idea of including SDG financing as part of expenditures that would use that would be used to assess the needed debt reductions as well as integrating soft law principles for how to resolve that crisis as part of DSAs these are all alternatives that would bring basically be independent from predators and bring fairer alternatives that need to be be bigger part of the conversation so I hope I haven't overrun time too much but that's the end of my presentation thank you very much thank you very much Christina for this enlightening presentation and thank everybody all the presenters as well there has been many questions in the chat and also due to time constraints rather than doing a Q&A we unfortunately have to wrap up I could of course engage in a discussion with all of you for much longer but we have also some time constraints and then I just wanted to ask Sada to wrap up to sort of bring things together and bring things to a conclusion as well thank you so much so yes I will try to do so and in fact I will try perhaps to end on a more optimistic note because I'm aware that in my initial framing I have provided quite a gloomy picture and of course we need to be aware of the gloomy picture but I think we need to think in more optimistic terms in terms of where we go from here so I think what we know is that the system that we've had so far has produced a number of outcomes that are not working for the majority so we know that we cannot just go back to the old status quo something needs to change and our analysis and particular the analysis of all of the presenters show that we are able to identify where the problems are so starting from issues of health inequalities which of course are underpinned by socio-economic inequalities how cash transfers alone cannot be a solution and we need that you have long term visions and especially we need to push back against any potential return of austerity measures the need for commodity export in countries to diversify their productive capacity and their productive base as Nana was suggesting and of course the importance of focusing on job creation and the creation of good quality jobs and not only on economic growth that is driven by exports and extraction of natural resources but the importance of ensuring decent livelihoods to people alongside the importance of the valorisation of care and social reproduction which we have been mentioning as a cross pattern theme and finally also the need for institutional change to address the debt prices that too many countries will be facing in different ways so I think this is no easy task but I think where we need to go from here is to work collectively towards the formulation of alternatives along the lines that we have to address the problems so that we can see very clearly so I think I will end here thank you so much and sorry let me just thank again all of the presenters and clearly the future is in the hands of women as our panel has demonstrated so it was great and thank you so much all for your contributions and particularly also the contributors who are in the background but who are here with us and we really appreciate your support and your work and thank you to all of the audience as well but probably you can close this yeah no I mean I couldn't I couldn't have wrapped it up better than you that was perfect to bring everything together thank you very much Sarah and again also from my side on behalf of everybody but Lisa and and Janis of course as well thanks everybody for contributing to it thank you everybody for listening in today and as I said before if you want to get a copy of the special issue please fill in the in the Google forum that I sent around the beginning and yeah thank you everybody we have a last webinar in our webinar series for this term coming up in two weeks it's on the 24th of March as well again at five p.m. we have sort of continuing the theme of social reproduction a panel on social reproduction financial exclusion and alternatives so please have a look at the SOAS economic department of economics website where details can be found on that and it's again hosted on zoom at five p.m. on the 24th of March so please join us then as well and in the meantime have a great rest of your evening a great rest of your week and thank you from the department of economics for joining us today


With respect to the chaos, I'm so glad that you've joined me today here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm here with Keith Webster. Keith, welcome. Thank you so much for coming. Well, thanks for having me. You bet. Keith is with Faith Action for Equity. For Community Equity. For Community Equity. Sorry. I know it changed. It used to be face, and maybe that's what most people are used to hearing is face, which is faith action for community equity, right? And now you've changed it to faith action. Our trade name is faith action. It used to be face, but we've always had the corporate name, faith action for community equity. And I think that's what most people, that's a long name, most people know. Right, okay.  A lot of people said, what is this face? What does that mean? And so we said, you know, let's, faith action that really says what we are. Let's change it to faith action. And so faith action, you guys are basically a faith-based organization. We are faith-based. But every dip denomination, everyone is welcome, right? We are interfaith, right? Interfaith, okay. We're at our core, our churches and temples. We were founded by a number of pastors. They got together and said, you know, there's a lot of problems in the world. We don't need to just, you know, work on this on Sundays or whatever day they worship. Right. We're participating in this, you know, throughout the week and the community, making a difference, improving people's lives. So they got together, and you know, now it's not just churches and temples and that sort of thing. We've got a trade union, we've got other groups, because what it's about is that when you've got people working together, you know, trying to make the world a better place, that's fundamentally a spiritual connection. That's the way we see it. And so we're trying to raise up the people in Hawaii, you know, improve the quality of life. By listening to our members and saying, where is the pain? Where do we need to work together? Right. Exactly. Wow, I think that's so wonderful. So you were founded in 1996, right? That's right.  Because if you weren't being effective at all, you guys probably would have disbanded a while back. So that's really wonderful. Well, it's a lot of passionate people, right? Right. It's because we're working on the challenges that Hawaii faces. Right. There's a lot of those. Yes, there are. And so we work together with these passionate people that are working together to make the world a better place, right? Right. So it was put together by a few pastors. That's how it got started anyway. And I think Bob Nakata was one of the, was he one of the pastors? He was one of the founding pastors. Oh, he was one of the founding pastors. But he's been there for quite a while, yeah. Right. Right. So for those of you that are watching, I know Keith from Church, we go to Kahulutu Methodist Church together. And so we had a great faith action presentation at church not too long ago. And I said, wow, I really think that that is a word that we need to really get out there even more. And so that's why I've invited you to be here today.  Thanks so much. Well, I appreciate that. So why don't you give us a little bit of a, I don't know, an abbreviated version, I guess, because I'm sure you guys do so much that we only have a 30-minute show. So, right? So let me tell you a little bit about how faith action works. Okay, that'd be great. Yeah. Because at our core is the listening process. So what we do is the member organization. And we're an organization of organizations. So churches, trade unions, whoever, different organizations can come in. And the first step is to really listen to each other. So each organization goes through a listening process where people talk to each other and most importantly, listen to each other. And hear what are the fears, the concerns, the passions, you know, what's going on that people in our community and people in their membership really care about. And then those concerns bubble up. Some of them they deal with internally within the organization. Some of them are more suitable for other groups. But some of them bubble up and faith action will take them on. And over the years, we've done a number of things. We worked with the mayor right housing, right, to make some major improvements. They had years ago huge problems. They didn't have, you know, running hot, hot running water, all kinds of issues. And we helped organize the tenants organizations there so that they could, you know, stand up as a group together and make a difference. And that's because we had members that were in that, you know, that were in mayor right. And so they needed, you know, a voice and they needed that organization to give them the power. So we're an organization about building power, building power for the people. Or the people, not just for you and your committee, but for, yeah, we're a grassroots organization. That's wonderful. And so the way we're structured is like an inverted pyramid. So our organizations are all at the top.  So we're down there a little bit lower supporting. And then there's the, you know, the president and the board and they're really at the bottom because they're serving everyone above them. So you were the president for a while, weren't you? Didn't you tell me? I was the state president for a while and I was treasurer for a little bit before that. And then, you know, I had the opportunity when I started with Faith Action, I always wanted to work on housing. And so, you know, it was my time. And I said, okay. You know, I'm going to, I'd like to move over to the housing task force and really get into the meat of what it is to be working, you know, together with people trying to change the world is, you know, what we're doing, yeah. And trying to find out what works, right? And what doesn't work. Not just what doesn't work, but what does work. You find a program that is working. It's something that you're able to support and maybe help foster or how does that work? Is that kind of... Yeah, so we're working on structural change, right? So we work a lot with the legislature. We work a lot, you know, trying to, there's a lot of direct service non-profits out there and they're doing wonderful work. We work with them. We support them. Right. But our place is a little bit different and it's a matter of, we want to make the changes in our society so that people can stand up on their own. How can we restructure the way we work together so that it works for all of us? Right. And those are the areas we're working on. And that's the most important part, too, is working together, yeah. Yeah. So the Cappuna Caregivers Bill that we worked on over the last few years, that did pass and we were helpful in getting that through. And that was about, you know, we have an aging population. That's where that came up in our membership. Right. And people were really hurting. And it was a matter of, so you've got your Cappuna and you may be working full-time or part-time and, you know, it's very stressful. Anyone that's been a caregiver knows how stressful it can be. We said, you know, at the same time, we can't put all of our aging population in care homes. People have to age in place. Right. So how do we make that even possible? That's where people want to be. Sure they do, yeah. How do we make that possible? With a little bit of help, many people are able to age in place, you know, whatever help they have, giving them a little respite. So that's what the Cappuna Caregivers Bill is. And it's not perfect and we're working on tweaking it now, but that's the kind of thing we work on. You know, that's work and we structurally change it to make it work for everybody. Well, I know that in the presentation, you guys were talking a little bit about the REITs thing with all this taxation that's not really fair. These guys don't have to pay taxes here. And so Hawaii is missing out on tons of tax. So let me first say, though, that we are not against REITs. REITs are real estate investment trusts. And it's a kind of a corporation, right? And they basically, if they just invest in real estate, if they have at least 100 investors, they can, this was invented, I think, in the 60s. And they get a special break where they don't have to pay a federal income tax, right? If they give most of all their profits, 90% of their profits at least, through their dividends, then they're people receiving the dividend pay an income tax, right? And they don't have to pay a corporate income tax. Oh, and what if they don't live here, then they pay it to wherever they live? That's the problem. Fundamentally, the problem in Hawaii is that we've got so much wonderful real estate that's a great investment. We've got people coming from everywhere to invest in our real estate, but most of the investors, because our working people are struggling, so most of the investors are outside of Hawaii. So Hawaii doesn't get that corporate income tax. And in the old days, before this, these were owned by corporations, many of them, which did pay the corporate income tax. And so we're really losing our corporate tax base. And the challenge of that is that there's so much need, right? And we're working on affordable housing right now. It's very expensive to get this housing built. There's huge need, and yet, how do you build that when you're losing your tax base? So the idea of taxing the REITs, and this is not for the federal tax. They still don't pay the federal income tax, which is the bigger tax. The idea is, let's have them pay the state income tax on the corporate level so that they're giving back something to the economy that makes the profits that they're making possible. And we just see it as a fairness issue, but it's also just an issue that that money's really needed for a lot of the services that keep the economy going that make their investments possible. And so one of those needs is for affordable housing because there's a huge problem with building workforce housing, right? It's profitable to build the top of the market, you know, the million dollar, two million dollar condos. Developers can make a profit at that, but when you're building for people that are at 30% of the area median income, or 40% or 50% or 80% of it, it's very difficult to do that. And so a little bit of help would make a big difference in letting us build more of that housing. They're making lots of money, so it only stands to reason that they should have to pay. Well, it's an income tax, so if they're not making lots of money, they don't pay tax, right? Because you tax the profits. Right, exactly. So it's only when they're making profit. But yes, Hawaii on the whole seems to be a very profitable place to invest in. Oh, of course it is. And you know, everything. We are not against REITs. We like REITs. Okay. They are good corporate citizens. Okay. We just want to encourage them to... And to pay their fair share. We think everybody should have to pay their fair share of the taxes, right? Right. Across the board, all our politicians too, right? So you said you are now the co-chair of the Home Affordable Housing. So this is the housing task force for a faith action, right? Okay, yeah. So let's get back to that. Okay. Let's get back to the affordable housing part. And what are some of the problems that have sort of made themselves known and apparent to you? So what we're working on, we're in the legislative session. So you have to pick something to focus on, right? Sure. So there's a lot of things we're working on long term. For this legislative session, we're working on the REITs and we're working on trying to put more money into the rental housing revolving fund. That's a state fund that's used to help provide the gap funding that's needed for non-profit and for-profit developers that are building affordable rental housing, right? And the challenge is that when you pencil it all out and you're going to be charging these lower rents, and construction costs are very high in Hawaii, it just doesn't pencil out. And so there's a bit of subsidy that's needed. It's actually a long-term loan, and that over many, many, many years, some of this money actually does come back into the revolving fund, but it does take a long time. And what this allows is for us to build that affordable housing, and it's done through a state agency that puts out requests for proposals, developers for-profit, non-profit come in and they give their proposals, and then they select it and work with them. But it's a long process. And so there's a lot of challenges to that. So what we're working on in the legislative session is how do we get more money into this housing fund so that it's available for this housing? And then in the long run, we're also working on how do we streamline the process? Because we've got a lot of housing to build, and there's a lot of bottlenecks that keep it from being built. Money is not the only problem in Hawaii, right? Right. Yeah. No kidding. Space and utilities and all of that is a big problem too, right? But we did have a big win. I'm sorry. No, no, no. I just want to say we had a big win. You mentioned Bob Nakata, right? He was the co-chair of the Housing Task Force for Faith Action before, and he's retired now, but he was instrumental, among other people, in getting the Bob Nakata bill passed last year, which put in $200 million into the Rental Housing Revolving Fund. Oh my gosh, that's huge. So this was a big investment, right? That is a really big deal. So the state is really doing good things. What we want to do is we want to get some more money in there. We want to keep the momentum because we've got so much housing to build, we've got to keep it going. Absolutely. And that's what we're working on. Listen, we're going to have to hold on to that thought and come back and talk about it a little bit more after the break, okay? We're going to go to a break just for a minute, so don't go anywhere. Stay with us here. I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair on Finding Respect on the Can. Hey, loha. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii, airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because security matters. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lo and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii and on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about. Whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Aloha. Welcome back to Finding Respect on the Chaos. I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair and I'm here with Keith Webster who's from Faith Action and he is doing some really great things out there. The whole organization just sounds so amazing. So what I want you to do is tell us a little bit more about Bob Nakata because I know he used to be the pastor at Kahalu but he was already gone long before I got there. I've met him some and I know he's just this dynamic amazing guy who's done so much for the homeless in Hawaii that the bill was named after him even. Tell us about that if you wouldn't mind. Sure. Yeah. So Bob Nakata was definitely a mentor for me and he's one that recruited me into the church and into Faith Action. So in my personal story, yeah, when I was done being a scout master in my son's troop when he got his eagle, I was looking for something else to put my time with and the church that sponsored our troop, our Boy Scout troop was the Kahalu United Methodist Church which Bob Nakata was the pastor and I just got to talking with him and I found out, you know, the work that he was doing and had been doing for years because he had been a state senator and so he was still very much involved in politics and he was really working on systemic change. That's what his life was about and is about and so I want to, you know, I'd like to get involved and work with that and that's how I got into the Faith Action. So when I started out, I was a representative for our church because every organization member has a representative and that's how we make decisions, right? There's a steering committee, we get in and discuss what is important to our membership, what issues do we want to take on and the steering committee representatives are the ones that really run the organization and decide. That's that inverted pyramid we were talking about, right?  And so Faith Action is available for that and we'd love to have you work with us individually or get your whole organization, whatever you're working with and again it's not just churches, right? So feel free, let me just give you our website, right? As I was just going to say, let's tell them what the website is and just www.faithaction.org. That's correct and it's all spelled out, Hawaii is spelled out. www.faithaction.org. So if you go on the website, there's ways to contact us and we would love to communicate with whoever's interested in working and getting involved. It's really about listening. It's about listening and then figuring out together how we're going to work to change the way we work together as a society, as a culture, as a community. When we do that active listening process, when you're active listening, you're listening with a thought in mind as opposed to just hearing something, right? When you do that kind of active listening, it makes all the difference in the world and that's where ideas come from, that's where genius can, you know, be sparked and stuff. Well and it's also how we connect with each other. Yeah, exactly. It's about really, you know, connecting as a culture. We need to really talk to each other and get to know each other. It's not just about being Facebook friends, it's about really knowing each other, what we're passionate about and so faith action is working on building power to help make the changes that our members feel need to be made and the way we do that is the power of the people, people working together. Well, wasn't that a big phrase in the 60s, power to the people? I think it was a song even, right? Well, we did it, we did it, power to the people. And I think we need that, excuse me, I think we need that now. We need to have that, the people need to come together and remember that we do have power, we don't just have to be guinea pigs. Well, it's very easy to be cynical, right? Because you look at the way politics works and if you've got enough money, you can be heard, right? Because money is voice. Yes, it is. But if you've got a lot of people together with an idea, that also is power. That's big power. Yeah, so that needs to be in the conversation. So we're working on affordable housing right now. And figuring out where it's going to be. Now, that just sounds like a nice thing to do, but anytime you get into the weeds, anytime you get into the details, it's difficult, right? It is, of course it is. So it's not just the money, we're in the legislative session. So we're working on getting the funds so that there's money to invest in the building of affordable housing. So is the bill called affordable housing or what's this? So the bill for the REITs was one and House Bill 475. And those are going through the process right now. So that's the one we're focusing on. There's another bill for putting the 200 million more into the rental housing revolving fund that we're working on. Tell us about this 200 million revolving fund, if you don't mind.  But tell us a little bit more about that before we go on to the next thing. I want to know more about that, whatever that is, that 200 million dollar thing. Yeah, that's a big deal. It's a lot of money. That's a lot of money is right. But it's a big problem and it's been brewing for a long time. I think that's really the issue. Hawaii had a crisis in affordable housing 20 years ago, 30 years ago. I mean, it was a crisis.  So we have to change the way we work. We have to do something different if we're going to solve that problem. I'd like to see somebody make some kind of law that stops this house flipping thing. The realtors get rich quick, buy this house for 50,000, sell it the next week for 80,000. But what that does is just jacks up the price for everybody. And I really feel it is at the crutch of all of that. So this is a very exciting time for people with your concern. So first of all, what we're working on this session is the rental housing revolving fund and getting that funding in place, right? As well as trying to get additional tax money in place in an equitable way, right? And this is what the people that are making the construction companies or whatever is making the proposal, the investors make the proposal to that fund. And that's where they get some of the money from. To the HHFDC, which is a federal, which is a state organization, which then allocates that money and distributes that money to the proposals for the building of rental housing, right? Which is only one component of the solution, right? It's not a complete solution. But we've got people on the street. We've got people that are one paycheck away from being on the street. And so we need to have the rental housing stocks available so that there's a place for people to go. We've got people that are... We've got a lot of nonprofits working with the homeless and trying to find a way to house them, right? Family Promise is one of them. And all these people, most of them work. They have jobs. They have no house, but they work full-time. Right. So the problem is now no rental housing stock. And so this develops that. So there's another approach going on. I'd like to mention it. It's not one that we're working on this legislative session, but Senator Stanley Chang, who is the chair of the Senate Housing Committee, has got some fascinating ideas. And he's recommending that we take on the Singapore solution. People may have heard that. It's been in the paper from time to time. I have not heard of that. What is it? So Singapore, they went... And it's a different structure, government structure. It's a different place. But what they did was they built very high-density housing. High rises, right? So tall high rises, very high density, but not low income. This is middle-class housing with barbecue pits and pools. And it's a nice place to live. And what they did was they did it with government money, government bond money. The government's actually built these places. And because it was government land, least at low prices, because they had a lot of economies of scale, the claim is that we may be able to build an apartment for approximately $300,000 a unit. That's amazing. A lot of our people in Hawaii could afford that. And there's a lot of developers that are suspicious that maybe we can't produce something for that price. But if we could, and you could build enough of that, that would really go a long way to solving this. Because the idea is you build enough housing to satisfy the demand. But then he also has a number of proposals to keep it from being the flippers, right? Yeah, that's the thing that worries me. So it built into that is, well, you have to live in it. And a large percentage of the profit, when you go to sell it, it's at market rate, but a large percentage of the profit over inflation would go back to the state, right? So the idea is you want people in there that are actually going to live there, that want to be in Hawaii, want to live in Hawaii. I need a house. These are not people that want to have money. Right. Yeah. So that's his idea. It's pretty radical. We haven't done that. Anything like that. Good idea. But we're getting some great ideas into the next, you know, and that's just so valuable. That's exciting. And it's exciting. Like you were saying a little while ago, it's very exciting to think that there could be tangible solutions to this huge problem. You know, the main platform here at Finding Respect in the Chaos is to help people that have been abused and get resources. And the homeless right now, the rate of rape and abuse and assault amongst the homeless is so high. And these are people that have jobs. Right. But they live in a tent, you know, somewhere in Waikiki. And so I know if we can fix those kinds of problems, it goes a long way to helping the people that are out there being abused still. I know this is some of my viewers. This might seem like I'm sort of in left field here, but I want to make the connection. There's a reason why we need all of these services to come together so that we can really help the people that are on the streets, the ground floor people, so to speak, right. And I love that you guys do that inverted pyramid thing so that the president's at the bottom and all the people are up at the top. They're the main ones that are making the decisions. He's just the one that's sort of steering the pyramid around, which I think is just brilliant that you put it together that way, right. How long have you been there? Sorry, go ahead and say what you're going to say. I just want to say I'm glad you highlighted that connection of what do people need. When you take people out of a stable living environment, we're under tremendous stress and all kinds of things happen. And if you want to correct that, we want to have people live longer and happier lives. Putting them in a stable living environment is really critical. So this is one solution. These are a few solutions towards that, right. And it's probably going to be more than one thing that fixes it. Is this problem that's been a long time coming? Yes, exactly. Wow, we're almost out of time. We are basically out of time now. And Keith, I want you to come back so that we can hear updates about your progress with all of these projects. Well, it's not my progress. It's Faith Action. Faith Action's progress. And all of our coalition partners.  I think it's really great. And I love getting the word out to people, and I think we need to do that more as much as we possibly can. So I'll be anxious to have you come back and tell us how everything's going. Well, thank you for letting us share our story. Oh, no, thank you for coming. I really appreciate it. So I want to thank you all too for tuning in. I am once again Cynthia Lee Sinclair. This is Finding Respect in the Chaos on Think Tech Hawaii. And I hope you'll join me next time.


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