Economy

Today’s central line of conflict runs between open societies and various forms of Identitarian radicalism. The challenge we face is to reconcile rapid changes in a globalized modern age with our need to belong and our need for security.

On 9 December 2011 all 17 members of the eurozone and countries aspiring to join agreed on a new EU treaty to put strict caps on government spending and borrowing. This intention may, for many different reasons, end up to be yet another paper tiger. One of them may be that EU authorities fail to address a major hole in the system. The hole´s name is public-private partnerships (PPP). Another is Commission´s culture of feeding wasteful projects, no questions asked. In its February 2004 decision on deficit and debt, the Eurostat recommends that “the assets involved in a public-private partnership should be classified as non-government assets, and therefore recorded off balance sheet for government, if both of the following conditions are met: 1. the private partner bears the construction risk, and 2. the private partner bears at least one of either availability or demand risk.”

The global economic and financial crisis, already a reality of everyday political life, has also become the main topic of the elections for the European Parliament – here in the Czech Republic as well. The same voices who have been warning that intensified European integration threatens the national sovereignty of the Member States – leading Czech politicians among them in particular – are now demanding solidarity and a coherent, consistent EU in relation to the crisis

The much anticipated G20 Summit with the heading “Stability, Growth, Jobs” went ahead without any serious complications. Whether it can be called a successful summit is debatable, but what is certain is that it was not, as many predicted, unsuccessful.

On 4 March 2009, Glopolis and the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung convened a conference entitled “The global food crisis, one year on. How to achieve food security.” The program was focused particularly on those structural causes of the food crisis related to the areas of agriculture and trade. Leading experts from the Czech Republic and abroad gave their views of the current global food situation, the quality of agricultural policies, and the operations of the global trade in agricultural commodities. Those participating included Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Daniel de la Torre Ugarte of the Institute for the Analysis of Agricultural Policy from the University of Tennessee, Mamadou Cissokho of the Union of West African Farmers’ and Agricultural Producers’ Organizations, and many others.