Category Archives: In English

Celebrating United Nations’ 75th birthday by packing UNHCR with human rights abusers.

Posted on by
2

Spoiler: United Nations is becoming less and less relevant for each passing year. Russia is regularly abusing its veto rights in the Security Council which paves the way for war crimes and violations in human rights. By adding insult to injury, the Human Rights Council, (UNHCR), will next year include a member whose regime is committing genocide: China. Only half of the members in the UNHCR are democracies. The other half regularly violates its peoples’ civil rights.

While Rule of Law and Freedom of Speech are more or less absent in many UNHCR member states, Regime Corruption is pervasive. Are these countries really committed to uphold human rights? No, of course not. Many countries commit themselves to violate human rights. The UNHCR is a joke. A very bad joke.

Continue reading →

The Crumbling States of America

Posted on by
1

Spoiler: USA has changed from being exceptional in a good way to being exceptional in a bad way. The dynamism of US product markets has decreased. It shows up in lower firm growth, higher concentration and weaker competition. This has led to increased inequality, lower investments, innovation, and productivity growth. At the same time, horrible things are happening with parts of the population. Life expectancy rates are declining because people are dying from suicide and drug abuse. Since this is happening mainly to people with low education and incomes, inequality in health is increasing.

To reverse the developments, the political system needs to be more transparent and less sensitive to rent seeking by large enterprises. But unless the Trumpian tendency to autocracy is reversed, it will be difficult to make the necessary changes.

Continue reading →

Putin vetoes human rights

Posted on by
1

Spoiler: After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia granted to take the place of the Soviet Union as a permanent member of the United Nations’ Security Council. That was a mistake. The position has mostly been used to block investigations into human rights violations, Russian occupations of other countries’ territories, protect pariah regimes and block UN aid to refugees.

After Putin came to power, Russia has used its veto to prevent the UN to act against regimes who violate human rights and even persecute their own populations. The first vetoes blocked UN actions against the regimes in Myanmar and Zimbabwe. These vetoes were not based on any considerations of what was going on in the two countries. They were supporting China’s vetoes. The Chinese regime was not interested in having UN missions in countries where China had invested.

Continue reading →

Real wage and labour share developments in Sweden.

Posted on by
1

Spoiler: Analysing inequality in Sweden by looking at developments of capital and labour shares 1960-2019 show that inequality is not a big issue. Labour’s share in GDP is closely related to the real wage. Growth of hourly real wages has not lagged labour productivity growth.

In the previous post, I showed that the wage share had increased in Sweden since 1993. That conclusion may be based on the initial point in the sample. In fact, it wasn’t. The wage share has been, as Kaldor suggested a long time ago, relatively constant over a long period of time. In this post, I will take a longer view on capital and wage shares in Sweden.

Continue reading →