Category Archive: Project Syndicate

Mexico’s Democracy is at Stake in 2024

Image: Project Syndicate

By Jorge G. Castañeda

Over the course of two centuries of independence, Mexico has elected its leaders democratically on only four occasions. Whether the presidential election in June will be fair and free is questionable, given that the playing field is heavily tilted in favor of the ruling party’s candidate.

Many countries, from the United States and Uruguay to India and Indonesia, will hold elections in 2024. Although pundits, politicians, and political scientists tend to portray each one as “historic” and “momentous,” Mexico’s June 2 presidential election may be one of the few to warrant such superlatives, if only because the country has limited experience with truly democratic votes.

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Can Latin America Escape Its Second Lost Decade?

Image: Project Syndicate

By José Antonio Ocampo

Latin America’s economies continued to be the worst-performing in the developing world in 2023. To boost economic growth, the region’s political leaders must increase their investments in science and technology, foster regional integration, and reaffirm their commitment to democratic governance.

Latin America has come to the end of its second lost decade of development. Average annual growth hovered just below 0.9% for the 2014-23 period – worse than the 1.3% rate in the 1980s. GDP per capita, however, is projected to be slightly higher in 2023 than in 2013, owing to slower population growth. By contrast, it was not until 1994 that the region’s GDP per capita returned to its 1980 level. Still, Latin America has a severe growth problem.

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Feminist Economics for All

Image: Project Syndicate

By Mercedes D’Alessandro

It may seem obvious to a layperson that failing to support an economy’s labor force must come at a cost. Yet conventional economic models render nearly invisible – or simply wave aside – a dimension of inequality that pervades economic policymaking and macroeconomic outcomes.

Not everyone has lost out from the “polycrisis” that we are now enduring. Perversely, both extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years. Worse, a host of other problems also now demand our immediate attention – from high and rising debt and increasing job precarity to inflation, climate change, and food insecurity.

To reconfigure our economies for growth and sustainable development, we must go back to the intellectual drawing board to identify elements of economic theory and practice that have been overlooked. For example, even though the pandemic exposed deep flaws in how we think about care, many governments and businesses continue to neglect this dimension of the economy.

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The Food-System Revolution is Coming

Image: Project Syndicate

By Robin Willoughby and Nico Muzi

Demographic, environmental, and consumer factors have brought the global agriculture sector to a crossroads. To avoid political hazards, decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society will need to heed the lessons from major transitions in other industries and start preparing.

Disruption is coming to the agriculture sector. Around the world, livestock farmers are leaving the land, policymakers are targeting the harmful environmental and social effects of industrial meat production, and consumers are shifting away from meat to embrace healthier, more sustainable alternatives. With the sector approaching a crossroads, decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society will need to heed the lessons from major transitions in other industries and start preparing.

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The Digital Government Agenda North America Needs

Image: Geoffrey A. Fowler/The Washington Post via Getty Images/Project Syndicate

By Anne-Marie Slaughter and Alberto Rodríguez Alvarez

Canada, Mexico, and the United States have a chance to forge a regional agenda to position North America as a global leader in digital government services. Having already established a solid foundation for cooperation, they must now build on it.

In Ukraine today and in many other conflicts around the world, the digital domain has become a battleground for cyberattacks and information warfare. Even in normal daily life, digital platforms can endanger citizens and democracies by encroaching on individual privacy, manipulating consumer attention, fostering social isolation, and nurturing extremism. But, while not downplaying these harms, we should also remind ourselves of the many good things that today’s new technologies offer.

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Se necesita del liderazgo femenino para alcanzar la justicia climática

Image: Project Syndicate/ Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images

Por Laura Chinchilla y María Fernanda Espinosa

El mundo está muy consciente de que la crisis climática es uno de los principales escollos para el desarrollo sostenible. Y, sin embargo, a pesar de las dramáticas pruebas sobre las consecuencias letales del cambio climático, y a pesar de poseer los conocimientos, las tecnologías y los recursos para dar solución al mismo, continuamos en el mismo camino de altas emisiones de carbono que amenaza nuestra supervivencia.

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The Subordination of Women in Texas

Image: Project Syndicate

By Chiara Cordelli and Aziz Huq

Texas’s new abortion law subjects women to heightened surveillance and the whims of private parties. If the US Supreme Court upholds the law, it will set back gender relations to an era that precedes the living memory of most Americans.

In 1984, the late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a lecture on why Roe v. Wade, the Court’s 1973 decision recognizing a constitutional right to abortion, was wrongly decided. The case, she explained, should never have been framed as a matter of privacy or reproductive choice alone: Abortion was at bottom a question of gender equality.

Thirty-seven years later, Texas is proving Ginsburg’s point with its draconian and potentially transformative abortion law. If the Supreme Court upholds the law – it just heard oral arguments on whether to permit two legal challenges to proceed – it will set back gender relations to an era that precedes the living memory of most Americans.

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