 brilliant speakers and we want to hear from them. Shall I get started and just welcoming everyone? Yes, I know people are still joining us, but that's okay. I'm not the important one they need to hear from. Okay. Welcome everybody that's joining us for the very first of our seminars in the Soati Economics Department. My name is Hannah Bagawi. I am one of two heads of department. Lisa van Weinberger is with us too in the participants. Hello, Lisa. So this is the very first of our new season of webinars that I'm delighted that Sara Stefano and Tobias Franz have been coordinating and they've put together a wonderful program under the theme of intensifying inequality and the limitations of global capitalism. As we all know, COVID-19 has exposed the inequalities that already exist and it's also exposed the limits of global capitalism. So it's no better time than now to really discuss this. I'm just going to say a couple of words about Soati Economics. And that's to say that through our research and our teaching we have for a long time offered alternatives and also offered opportunities to debate alternatives to global capitalism and exposing those intersecting inequalities. And one of the ways we've often done that has been through our seminar series that traditionally we would have had in Soati on campus that's open to students, our staff, our visitors and guests. One nice thing about us not being able to do that, perhaps one side effect of COVID-19, is the fact that we are doing this now online and through that we are actually open to a much wider audience than we would have if we were just on campus. So I welcome all of you that have joined us whether you're staff, students, alumni, or just visitors and we have a wonderful set of speakers today. Please do stay in touch with us, follow us. We're on Twitter, on Facebook, on various social media channels and stay in touch with us. And if you're interested in Soati Economics go to our website where you can also find out about our previous seminar series, The Economics of COVID-19, where the recordings from last year's seminars were there as well to give you a flavor of that. But I'm gonna hand you over to very capable hands of Tobias, who's gonna be moderating today and I'll let him introduce the speakers and take it from there. But you're very welcome and I hope you enjoyed the first event. Thank you very much for this, Hannah. And as Hannah already said, this webinar couldn't be launching at a more apt moment specifically with the topic of intensifying inequalities and limitations of global capitalism. And also with that I want to welcome you, everybody, to the Soati Economics webinar series that Sara Stibano and I put together. My name is Tobias Franz, as Hannah already said in the introduction. And also something that Hannah did say and many superlatives have been used in the past eight months to describe this current crisis. But really, this is an unprecedented situation that not only lays bare the limitations and contradictions of global capitalism and what Hannah said accentuates the underlying and ever-increasing intersecting inequalities. The current crisis also fundamentally challenges the way in which we think, we write, we talk, we teach about economics. So what our webinar series is trying to do is to bring together perspectives that extend our understanding of how these different inequalities have been taking root in our societies and economies and how these relate to the various crises of global capitalism from the crises starting in the 80s, 90s, the global financial crisis, but most particularly, of course, the current crisis we are living through. So the aim of this webinar series is also to reach across the disciplinary boundaries, to put economics in dialogue with other social sciences and center the interdisciplinarity in our department's heterodox tradition and regional expertise. So we want to foster with this seminar series an interdisciplinary dialogue to help us better understand the challenges we face but also to contribute to a policy discussion, to solutions that might lead to a recovery from this crisis and to build a more resilient, more equal and more environmentally sustainable world economy. Of course, it gives me also great pleasure to introduce today's session, particularly as the launch of the webinar series talking about the universal basic income with perspective from periphery Europe and from Southern Africa. And just to introduce the speakers and the discussion of today, first we will have Ruth Castelbranco, who is the research manager for the Future of Workers Project at the Southern Center for Inequality Studies at Witt's University in Johannesburg. She has a BA in Geography and African Studies from the University of Wisconsin Medicine and MA in Development Studies from the University of KwaZulu in Natal and is currently finalizing her PhD in Sociology also at the University of Witt's in Johannesburg. Previously, Ruth worked at the International Labor Office in Mozambique and on social and maternity protection. She first became interested in questions of labor as a student activist, cutting her teeth as a labor organizer in DC for DC jobs and justice in Washington, the United States. Ruth is an alumna of the International Center for Development and Decent Work and her research interests include informal worker organizing and workers rights, redistributive policies and social protection, agrarian transformation and changing nature of work. So very happy to have her start today's session and then followed by our very own Costas La Javizas who is professor of economics here at SOAS in the Department of Economics. And his research during the last few years has particularly focused on the Eurozone and the financialization of capitalism. He has published widely in the academic field and writes frequently in the International and the Greek Press. Back in January, 2015, he briefly left our department to join the Greek Parliament with the incoming Syriza party but then left again in August, 2015 when the third bailout of Greece was signed and rejoined the economics department. His most recent book include capitalism and the Ottoman Balkans, the left case against the EU, against the Troika, crisis austerity in the Eurozone and profiting without producing. And also a very warm welcome to our discussion today who will be Syriza Kala. Syriza is a South African activist and scholar. She holds a bachelor of commerce degree in philosophy, politics and economics and a bachelor of arts in political science, both from Witz. And she recently completed her MSc in African Studies at Oxford and is a member of C19 People's Coalition and is currently also experiencing a little bit with filmmaking. So a very diverse and very interesting panel for today. And before I hand over to Ruth who will start with her 20 minute presentation, just a few housekeeping rules. So first and foremost, I already said that in the chat box. Please do let us know from where you're joining us from. You find the chat box on the right bottom side off your screen. So please just let us know where you're joining us from. And then throughout the webinar, you can please send us all of your questions or discussion points that might come up during the chat of Ruth or of Kostas and that we will collect in the first 40 to 60 minutes of the session and then I will collect these questions and give them to the presenters. So yeah, as I said, we start with Ruth's 20 minutes that we have Kostas speaking for 20 minutes. Chairira will then discuss with both of the presenters and then we hand over to the questions that come from you guys. So please respect the etiquette in the chat and be respectful of each other. And yes, this session is recorded. You will also find the recording then on the economics departments website. So yeah, without further ado, I'll hand over to Ruth who will start the session. Hello, everyone. My name is Ruth Kastalbranco. Thank you so much for the invitation to be part of the seminar. And it's an auspicious day to start with discussions on UBI because actually today is the global day of decent work. And in South Africa, various trade union federations and the C19 coalition came together for a general strike. And one of the demands is around the extension of the emergency COVID grant into universal basic income. Now I'm not gonna speak about that in at least in this first session because we have Shaira Kahla here who is part of the C19 coalition and can say many more interesting things about it than I can. But I think, you know, simply to raise that of course these are political questions and are the outcome of processes of struggle and reflect the conjunctures of power. And I think, you know, for me as a researcher, it's always very important to have that, to hold that front and center, even as we engage in debates about the structure, the labor market and the costings of UBI that ultimately these are part of a political process of struggle. So for this session, I'm gonna focus on the crisis of reproduction and the conundrums of universal basic income in the case of the Mozambique. And I'm just gonna take, sorry, let me just, the first, there we go. I'm still getting a hang of this program, there we go. And so after looking at kind of the structure of the labor market in Mozambique and some of the problems, we're gonna look at the social welfare system, reflect on some of the conundrums that are specific to Mozambique and then have some general reflections on universal basic income. Okay, so Mozambique has among the lowest unemployment rate on the African continent, this is the strict unemployment rate according to ILO statistics, you see South Africa, it was 27.3 in 2019, Mozambique was only 3.2. However, when you actually dig into these numbers, you see that the vast majority of the economically active population is concentrated in small-scale agriculture, though there has been a decline in the last 10 years. There's also been a decline in industry and then an arise in these rather unknown activities, which are actually, which the National Institute of Statistics categorizes as unknown. And because they have leased the raw data from the census for reasons that have to do with electoral politics and fraudulent elections, then we're actually unable to kind of dig into what these different categories are and what the decisions were by the National Institute in order to define what were. But it points to what Bernstein identifies as increasingly fragmented and fluid classes of labor. And more worryingly is you see a dramatic drop in the last 10 years of the economically active population from 69.2% to 57.6%. And when you then look at what it means, oh, sorry, this slide seems to have gotten confused, but when you look at what that means in terms of, well, what is economically active in Mozambique, the truth is that the statistics define employment so broadly that even the most residual activities count, right? So if you do one hour of cultivation in the past week, you count primarily as a small-scale farm, own-account worker or an unpaid family worker. So the graph is both confused and underchefied, but the key point is that only 12% of Mozambique's economically active population is actually in salaried employment. And a third of those are not covered by labor or social protections. And you can see that by looking at the social security data. And of course, this is highly gendered. So men are overrepresented in public enterprises and private enterprises and women are overrepresented in the residual activities such as own-account work without employees or unpaid family work, which tends to be small-scale agriculture for food rather than cash crops. That's sort of how the statistics get collected. And so the main point is that we have low unemployment rate, a low strict unemployment rate, but actually very low levels of wage labor. And one of the interesting things, if you look, this is not the expanded unemployment rate, is that there's an inverse relationship between unemployment and poverty and non-nutrition. It is often men in the top quintiles of the consumption distribution in urban centers have the highest rate of unemployment and it's women in the bottom quintiles of the consumption distribution in rural areas that have the lowest rate of unemployment. And so this is obviously a reflection of the fact that the majority of Mozambicans have not been entirely dispossessed in the means of production, but are not able to actually meet their reproductive needs from small-scale agriculture and are thus cobbling together a livelihoods from multiplicity of other activities that are not adequately reflected in census or household data. And even wage workers, wages in Mozambique, half of the wages are below the line of working poverty that's not unusual for salaried workers and to be engaged in other informal activities or to have a small farm or so. And so then the questions of unemployment in Mozambique have always been dealt with in a rather uneven way, right? Because on one hand, the statistics suggest that it is not a problem and on the other hand, we know that it is a massive problem. And I think that this quote really highlighted this was the woman in the district of Ribaue which is a fertile area. And she says, when I was born, no one spoke about unemployment. Only the occasional person with a child in the mission school was concerned with placing their child in the city. With the expansion of education, secondary schools began to offload graduates whose inclination is not to embrace the whole while work is for everyone, employment is not. And that is the kind of dynamic that you're seeing and you're seeing growth concerns in Mozambique with youth unemployment in particular because young people have their sights set on other types of activities. And without adequate state support for small scale agriculture, it's incredibly risky and subject to the vagaries of both the weather and the context of climate change and the market. So the social welfare system in Mozambique is composed of two pillars. Well, one is actually social security which is a contributory system for workers primarily though not exclusively in the formal economy. So the government has tried in the last five years to incorporate informal workers into the contributory social and insurance system. But the truth is that most people in Mozambique don't have contributory capacity and that covers about 750,000 people together. And then you have publicly funded social welfare which is for poor and vulnerable adults or poor and vulnerable households. So although social protection is a right according to the social protection law actually only 10% of Mozambicans have access to it and you can't actually sue the government for the lack of social rights if the social rights are not recognized. I think the interesting aspect about the cash transfer systems in Mozambique is that they really started as a way to grease the wheels of structural adjustment. So you see in 1990 there was only, there was less than a handful of people that were within the cash transfer that had been registered. And it was introduced as an initiative of the World Bank to get rid of more universal forms of social provisioning such as a subsized food during the social period. And then you kind of see an increase up to 1996 which was considered somewhat of a miracle because the office at the time only had four staff and development agencies concerned with questions around cost efficiency lauded this as an example of improved cost efficiency the ability to increase to 100,000 beneficiaries with a tiny team of government officials. Of course when they then did a registration they realized that more than two thirds of the beneficiaries were phantom names and so the number dropped in 1997 but I think it's a cautionary tale to this kind of idea this fantasy that cash transfers can just be magically transferred from the pockets of whether it's donors or national government to the pockets of the poor sidestepping the neo-patrimonial state whereas in fact you need a very strong state administration to be able to register and issue cash transfer payments and so on and so on. And then you see a kind of bumbling of the evolution of cash transfers until 2007 and that's when you have the Livingston process and the FADEC countries funded by DFID and you begin to really get an acceleration of interest in cash transfers as an efficient and effective instrument of inclusive growth and so the story of cash transfers in Mozambique in contrast to South Africa is one really that's embroiled within the development world and reflects the pattern of international development funding and I think that that's important as we think about the role of cash transfers in creating what James Ferguson calls a radical politics of distribution or perhaps the limitations of cash transfers in the context where international development agencies have so much influence over the design and implementation of cash transfer programs. So the cash transfer program now covers about 600,000 households and Mozambique has a different moment toyed with the idea of shifting to individual cash transfers but the truth is that the household approach to selection is a way of reducing the number, the total number of eligible units, right? So by using households instead of individuals you're able to then reduce the number and so it's never been able, it's always ended up implementing these cash transfer programs on a household basis and the largest is the basic social subsidy program which is for the labor constraints, primarily elderly and they get a transfer anywhere between 540 and 1,000 nipikais which is about $8 to $14, right? And you see that as a percentage of the updated poverty line that's insufficient really to meet household needs and then you have the productive social action program which is for able-bodied adults of working age and it's conditional on labor intensive public works and there there's just a set payment of 1,050 so it really depends on the size of the household how much that function ends up being. The latest program which is right at the bottom it got cut off is the direct social action emergency program which was expanded with the COVID pandemic and so it provides cash transfer equivalent to $21 over a period of six months and it's estimated to cover over a million households so the COVID pandemic created this opportunity to expand the cash transfer system well be almost more than doubling actually the total number of households covered and if you notice the value of this cash transfer is also significantly higher than the other ones. It's focused on urban and peri-urban areas as well as the province of Kabul, Bilgadu which is currently under an insurgency and I think this is the first time that the Mozindican government has actually started to think about cash transfers as a way of trying to appease or drive forth some kind of social cohesion in a sort of very targeted way but of course then it introduces all these other criteria which are the socially acceptable vulnerable categories which of course whittle down the number of eligible households so they have to be headed by children and the elderly people with disabilities and so on. So even though it's an unconditional cash transfer and it's the first of its kind for able-bodied adults and it's a higher value and it hopes to expand over a much larger number of people it still has all of these other forms of complex selection methods built in to try to rationalize the number of people who are eligible in the context of widespread poverty and informality so as I mentioned there's these innovations which are the unconditional nature of the sheer scale of the program. It's also funded entirely by donors whereas the other cash transfers are funded by the national budget. And so what that's facilitated then is a kind of conditionalities and one of the conditionalities around transparency and efficiency is this idea of the digitization of payments via e-wallet and of course that raises a whole set of other problems in the context of Mozambique because only 25% of the population have access to cell phones and in fact the budget allocated for the payment of cash transfers through a private provider in this case it's a cell phone company called Moffitel is nearly double that which it costs to pay public sector unionized workers to deliver the cash transfers manually and in fact the contracts are still being negotiated so there's an interesting process where digitization has been hailed as kind of the response to rapidly roll out cash transfers and indeed in some countries it's worked but in the case of Mozambique it's all suited to the context that costs the state more money and it's been able to it's been driven primarily because donors have pushed that as part of kind of a broader strategy around outsourcing and I think that the South African case raises lots of cautionary tales about what happens when you outsource cash transfers to private providers the bundling of financial services and so on so the payments still haven't happened six months on but it's this commitment to expand transfers significantly so this has then raised the possibilities for civil society organizations to begin thinking about what would that mean to have universal basic income or what would it mean to use this emergency grant as a wedge to push for something that's universal and unconditional and so then we began to do some of the costings and what you see is that if you expanded the cash transfer as it now is to all individuals so it took the idea of universal and unconditional cash transfer paid to all on the basis of citizenship literally it would cost 129% of the national budget and 47% of GDP because of course Mozambique's GDP is tiny as it's national budget right it's 5.5 billion dollars and so then you can begin to play with the numbers to try to get to something that's more acceptable so we get to okay well maybe we can do two thirds of the lowest poverty line and that would be 600 Mitikai's which is about $9 for a household and that would cover 12% of the budget but average household in Mozambique is 4.4 people so by the time you're dividing $8 or $9 a month by 4.4 people you're dealing with $2 a month and so it's clear that there's space there is just a space to spend spending for cash transfers in Mozambique currently Mozambique allocates 1.6% of the state budget to cash transfer payments and 0.5% of GDP but how do you expand or how would you introduce universal basic income in a meaningful way while also making sure that you're still keeping those other cash transfers for people that have specific vulnerabilities along the life cycle people with disabilities, the elderly and so on so UBI is not a magic bullet in terms of social offer provisioning and nor is it the only form of public spending that's necessary and so obviously there's ways also of expanding revenue curbing listed in the list of financial foes development aid, reparations of some kind but I think that ultimately the process of redistribution cannot be disarticulated from the processes of production I think too often the debates around UBI assume that production is no longer relevant or that struggles at the point of production are somehow expired I think the case of Mozambique highlights that without Mozambique is not actually facing a crisis of overproduction and without expanding the redistributive base there's no way to actually functionally introduce something like universal basic income even at the lowest level and some James Ferguson will argue that any amount is good enough but actually there is something such as an insignificant cash transfer and in my research on current cash transfer payments many recipients argued that it's insignificant and would not necessarily struggle for it so this idea that any amount will then create a wedge and there'll be this radical politics around the point of redistribution isn't necessarily the case and of course that's also mediated by questions of notions of citizenship which in the context of Mozambique are fragile and certainly in the case where this is all being designed with a lot of influence from international development agencies and the other factor is of course what will you consume, right? So if you ignore production and there's a focus on basic income funded perhaps by reparations or by development aid but what will people in Mozambique consume with that except for inflation? So I think that it's really important in the Mozambican case being an agrarian country to have this articulation between land labor and welfare. I think one final cautionary or one, sorry, I think also here while one fine cautionary take down and I'll just raise this quickly is that the history of, I mean we haven't had universal basic income on a national level really anywhere but if you take for instance the experience of the Spinal Mac in 1795 in the UK which essentially was an unconditional cash transfer you saw that where there weren't labor protection then employers use the cash transfer in order to effectively pay workers, right? That happened in 1795 however it's also happening today. I mean if you look at the reports of how Walmart's business model how Walmart has been able to use food stamps in the US, right? And taxpayer money to subsidize the salaries of their workers that's the modern case in point and it's no wonder therefore that Walmart which is one of the biggest union busters supports universal basic income. I think the other thing is universal basic income is often attributed to Thomas Payne as an idea and he argued in 1797 that it was a way of compensating the expropriated and protecting the land of the landed gentry, right? So I think that in the case of Mozambique it's very clear that land plays a much more important role even of insufficiency in supporting people's livelihoods and you want to make sure that you can articulate the three together in order to ensure that people have access to land that they have, you know the labor protections are protected as we move towards experimenting with social welfare. I also just want to, I put this up because even though South African Mozambique are neighboring countries their profiles are actually quite different. So in the same way that there's no magic bullet around social welfare, you know the specificities of countries really matter. And so the options that are available on a policy level are also different. Thank you. Well, thank you very much Ruth. This was very interesting and I for one have a lot of questions and I hope also some other questions will come in the chat. Please feel free to use the chat books to ask your questions or raise an issue that might have come up. I will certainly come back to some of the questions that I noted down. But for now let's hand over to Costas for another 20 minute presentation and his take on universal basic income. Okay, thank you very much. And I must say I enjoyed the presentation by Ruth and he was particularly informative. I didn't really know much about the operation of cash transfers in Mozambique but I do know that you get them in a lot of developing countries. I will discuss and there are problems with them. I will discuss the question in the context of Spain which is not a developing country although some people would argue that much of the South of Europe is now a developing area. So there are some similarities. Anyway, thank you very much for the invitation. Let me share the PowerPoint. I hope you can see it. Maybe I didn't choose the right design for this. But anyway, so the talk is about rethinking UBI in the pandemic crisis in Africa from Spain. I wanna do two things. I wanna say a few things about the crisis and what it means and I want to place UBI or pandemic basic income in the context of the crisis. So without losing too much time because I've got not very much time. Let me in a sense set out my stall. This is an extraordinary crisis which emerged in the beginning of this year. And it's extraordinary because fundamentally of the role of the state, there are many issues to this and I won't touch upon them directly but I don't think there's any doubt at all that the crisis has demonstrated the colossal power of the nation states at the moment and actually it ought to put to bed all these debates about the state and the market and the weakness of the state, the state disappearing and various other things which I've spent most of my working life battling against. What is appearing states? The state is everywhere and the state has basically dictated the patterns of development and the patterns of movement across global capitalism basically. Particularly the crisis, the state has catalyzed the crisis through the lockdowns and he has also taken a precedent in the steps to confront this and taking steps to confront the crisis has been taking steps against neoliberalism which isn't the first time that the state has done that but it is particularly prominent now because despite all steps taken by the state the crisis is deep and intractable it will be with us for a long time. He has affected income and employment of working people. This is a very difficult time coming up in Europe. The winter is gonna be very difficult and of course inequality has remained very high. So a pandemic basic income in that context could be an important alternative policy. It is in that context I want to reconsider it. And I want to make that clear by seeing a couple of things on the debate on UBI. It is also longstanding. Ruth has given us a taste of that. I don't intend to rehash it here. I want to stress that of course there are many issues one could be concerned about when it comes to UBI. Many misgivings which I have always shared. So in that context I want to stress at the outset that government be first and foremost concerned with creating and protecting employment and spending minimum wages. UBI or the epidemic basic income shouldn't be a replacement for that. And under no circumstances should UBI be used to supplant other welfare provision as tends to happen in a number of developing countries. For cash transfers actually reduce the value that goes to working people and certainly not in more developed countries welfare provision must not be supplanted by that. It seems to me that the pandemic basic income should be an additional and important measure to confront poverty and to deal with this extraordinary crisis more generally. And the way to ensure its radical dimensions of course to discuss how it will be financed and financing it for me as I will show in a minute necessarily or preferably involves redistributive tax reform and all the financial arrangements. But let me tell you the story quickly about the crisis and then we will look at the empirical work on Spain which I hope substantiates the case more. Now one must start with the crisis of 2007-2009. I'm not gonna take too much time. All I will say is that that crisis which was vast was confronted on three levels. There were three levers to confront it. The first was of course active and extraordinary monetary policy, quantitative easing and bringing interest rates down to zero. It's interesting to observe that the funds provided by the state were actually hoarded as reserves by and large and they were not much deployed to expand lending or the money supply. In fact, in the United States with the still the paradigm country household and intra finance debt declined the last 10 years as a proportion of GDP, it declined substantially. Corporate debt recovered but it didn't do anything terribly stunning during the decade that followed. Second fiscal policy was deployed but it was largely passive even in the United States where fiscal policy was more widely deployed than in Europe or elsewhere. The US is older than the European Union and it sustained deficits and as a result it secured better rates of growth than Europe which was appalling for the last 10 years. But of course the price of that was expanding public debt. If you look at the United States, the debt that really increased the last 10 years is public debt. In a sense what we last 10 years is state financialization. And the third labor that was deployed to perform the crisis was of course aggressive defense of the international role of the dollar by the Fed. This is not much talked about but it's there and it is indicative of how the world works. Now the result was weak in financialization. That's how I read it, that's how I read the last 10 years and you can see it in a lot of ways. And I say this because the point I want to make is that the pandemic hit a world economy that was already weak. After 10 years of weak in financialization that pandemic emerged, historically weak profitability, both of industry production and finance, weak investment and growth, sustained financialization practices by US corporations particularly share buybacks. The sums are astounding especially for the large corporations and Christian, although I won't develop it much, financialization of developing countries, sorry it's a mistake here, financialization of developing countries continued apace. In so far as we had financialization in the last 10 years it was mostly in developing countries. Now the crisis hit the global economy, particularly the developed parts of it in this weakened position. And really it was the, for me it's the unprecedented role of the state that matters for the story of the basic income because the power of the nation state I think is currently without historical precedence. I mean what has happened this year left me speechless, there's no other way to describe it. The state catalyzed the crisis through lockdowns and the lockdowns amounted to triple shock, a shock to aggregate supply. In a sense disrupting supply chains globally but also disrupting the supply process nationally. And obviously that created unemployment or a tendency to lay off workers or keep workers on the books but not working particularly. The lockdowns also affected aggregate demand but the impact on demand was mixed to a certain extent demand declined but to an important extent the demand was rearranged among different sectors. And obviously the lockdowns hit financial markets particularly global financial flows which declined early in the beginning and stock markets. But crucially the state also confronted the crisis by going against, neoliberalism. And here there's a bit of a problem with my, no there is no problem with my slides when they're okay. The state confronted the crisis using the three, using essentially the three levers they used in 2007, 2009 but in a different way. Monetary policy was again deployed active and even more extraordinary than in 2007, 2009. What this did was to bring interest rates down to zero, expand reserves extraordinarily. And the result of the expansion of reserves this time was actually to increase bank lending and the money supply which we didn't see last time. The figures for the United States for M3 and so on in terms of the growth of lending to corporates and money supply growth are extraordinary. There hasn't been a jump in those aggregates ever since they started to be composed basically. It is precisely this that allowed of course the stock markets to come back. So much for the efficient market hypothesis. What efficient market hypothesis? The stock markets have actually behaved in the way that the state has made them behave. We're in the midst of an extraordinary boom again in the stock markets entirely sustained by the extraordinary growth of money and credit which the state catalyzed. Increasing the balance sheet of the central bank is without precedent in the United States. So that was the first thing. The first lever I'll come back to it. The second is of course extraordinary fiscal policy and that's where things are different and UBI could potentially come into extraordinary fiscal policy compared to 2007 and 2009 because this time fiscal policy was active and it was active pretty much across the developed world with differences and the differences matter. What we witnessed is without precedent. Essentially we witnessed the nationalization of the wage bill of large numbers of corporates including large corporates because that's what the furlough is and that's what paying people's wages to keep them on the books basically amounts to nationalizing the wage bill. At the same time, governments, a lot of governments in developed countries nationalized the income statements because effectively they guarantee enterprises against losses and therefore bankrupts in. Third and equally crucial, there were direct subventions of cash on the large-scale households the United States sending money to people through the post. So extraordinary fiscal policy interventions which of course resulted in huge deficits. I will have occasion to say a couple of things about those in a minute. And the third thing is of course again, not much talked about but of crucial importance aggressive defense of the international role of the dollar by the Fed. The Fed made sure that the dollar would not be challenged as the global reserve currency in so far as that was within the power of the Fed. Now let me move on and come to the point. All that has happened while corporate divisions in the world have become intensified. And for my purposes, this matters in the European Union. The European Union is a very interesting case because it has in a sense rediscovered the historic corporate division in capitalism in a new format. Now, I don't wanna go over the history of it. We all pretty much understand that there is a core to the European Union and a number of peripheries. The periphery that matters to me here is of course the Southern periphery, Spain, fundamentally, Portugal, Greece and most of Italy or large parts of Italy. Here, what matters is that the intensification of this core periphery division meant that the heat of Coronavirus and the impact of the crisis was differentially felt and meant that Southern countries could deal with the crisis much less effectively than core countries. The difference between Germany and say Spain or other parts of the periphery in this respect is now tremendous. How, let me say a few words and then we'll move on to Spain. In the course of the crisis, and partly because of the intensified division between core and periphery, the European Union proceeded to change its mode of operation substantially, making the nation state more important than before. People think that what we see in the European Union is actually, at the moment, somehow it moved towards greater federalism, precisely the opposite is happening. Actually everything we see is tense towards the strengthening of the role of the nation state which is what the crisis has done across the world. The ECB has loosened this mandate even further in order to provide liquidity. The stability and growth pact was suspended. State aid and Christian policy were suspended. And then next generation EU was adopted based on commission borrowing and fiscal transfers. These steps were steps which basically indicate that the core powers understood that the Union faced tensions that might lead to a breakup. And measures were taken. I believe that in that context, German condition in the European Union has been boosted and the Southern periphery found it very difficult to handle the fiscal requirements of the crisis. Essentially, if the crisis required extraordinary fiscal intervention, as it does, the Southern state could not face it, could not handle it in Europe because of the subordinate position in the European Union because of the extraordinary volume of debt that got and because of the restrictions on fiscal policy, basically. So let's go to Spain and let's see what this means. We'll show you the, I'll show you the, some of the empirics who constructed. If you look at Spain as an exemplar of how the crisis hit the South, the fall in GDP is conservative for this year, conservatively expected at 10%. I think it's conservative, but let's say it will be 10% and it's roughly what will be in other Southern countries. The result, of course, is being the exacerbation of poverty, deprivation, inequality by all the evidence we've got in our hands for this period. The Spanish government, aware of this, introduced the policy of minimum vital income on the 1st of June, 2020. I don't wanna give you the details. But essentially it's a policy of income support for poorer families, but already it's apparent that doesn't work well, reaching perhaps only 23% according to the latest figures of those facing material, severe material deprivation is a mistake here, not several severe material deprivation. Crucially, the policy is very bureaucratic and creates obstacles for people who are entitled. It puts people off from claiming it and that's a major problem with all policies of this type. It's in this context that Spain right now could do well, would do well to consider a pandemic basic income. And the policy that the paper I've done with three of my colleagues from Spain would have this format. We propose for debate, we propose that the government opens up online applications for pandemic basic income that basically require one bank account per adult. You would check the number of claimants. Payments will be made monthly. Income tax will be filled next year, no tax will be paid on the pandemic basic income. It would supersede other cash subsidies, but without loss to the recipient. And if it is illegally claimed, it will be put next year. We argued that there could be two possible cases to run from May to December, 2020. One would be based on the standard estimate of the threshold of the at-risk poverty in Spain. The other would be based on the modified OECD scale. The first would be PBI provided to individuals. The second would be PBI provided to households. And we then engaged in two similar, both of them would be as a right, provided as a right. We then engaged in two simulations to engage to assess the outcomes, assuming 100% coverage and 50% coverage. And the simulations here is here. Yeah, I know, I'll just sum it up, yeah. So the estimates then show you this, and I must say that they depend on the multiplier. We estimated the multiplier and we found that if the policy is adopted, GDP would be boosted through increased consumption. In other words, there's a demand effect, which would lead to employment and output effects, and tax intake would increase, and there would be savings on unemployment benefits and other well-classed ventures. The net expenditure by the government would be 43% of the gross expenditure. And in terms of GDP, it depends on the coverage, varying between 7.2% and 3.3% of GDP. We also engaged in sensitivity analysis, and all the outcomes indicate that it is perfectly manageable. Now, one more point of bias, I promise you, and I'll stop. This is affordable. The question is how to finance it, though, because there is still a net gap. How to finance it? The net cost will require the distributive tax reform. It's very clear, and it should be said, taxing wealth, higher incomes, covered profits. We also estimated, even with a single income tax rate of 46 to 49%, we can have a more progressive tax system in Spain if a basic income is reduced, because, of course, there will be benefits from the basic income. Now, in effect, then, a PBI would be an income transfer from the richest 20% to the poorest 50% in Spain. If the government doesn't want to engage in tax reform, we could also borrow. Borrowing is not the preferable policy, although it could be done, and it's not the preferable policy, because, of course, it gives extra rights to the owners of vulnerable capital of future value creation, but it could be done although it would involve conflict with the EU. It is up to the government, to the Spanish government, to do it, and it's up to the progressive forces in Spain to demand it. The preferable policy, however, is tax reform to finance it. So in that context, the sum up, the pandemic basic income strategy would make sense. Those who advocate and wish to advocate policies to challenge neoliberalism should consider it seriously because the crisis is deep. It will be with us for a long time, and it will not be dealt with without dramatic measures such as this. Thank you. Thank you very much, Kostas. And now I would hand over to Shaira. Shaira, are you there? Yes. Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me? Perfect. Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be with you. I'll try to keep my feedback brief and then go into some of my thoughts that I'd put down to share with you all today. I just wanted to reiterate what Ruth said about this being a very important day. Locally, this month is also quite significant in South Africa because five years ago, this month in October, the general strikes by our largest trade unions were also aligned with the fees must fall protests that were taking place across the country for decolonized and decommodified education. And these demands reverberated even to sow us, as I believe. So I'm very happy to be joining you today. And now we find ourselves again on the picket lines for a number of demands, including the demand for basic income guarantee. So two quick points from the presentations. In terms of Ruth saying that the devil is in the details, I totally agree. One point that you mentioned that really resonated with some of the challenges we've been having in South Africa is the digitization of payments in the COVID grant. This was proposed. It was a very small scale pilot project that was supposedly being carried out by the Department of Social Development and our social grant agency, SASA. And there was no transparency around where these machines were coming from. And there was also concern that in a country with such a huge digital divide, such as South Africa, that this was premature and really not needed. It was also ironic that the fastest way to get grants to people, which is through the offices, the SASA offices, SASA offices were actually operating at a third of their capacity at the height of the lockdown when people needed their grants and when the new COVID grant was actually announced, which is the first time in South Africa that we've actually had a grant which goes to unemployed people. And that meant that millions more people were eligible, up to 15 million from our calculations. And we've seen that the implementation of the COVID grant has been dismal in that 4.3 million people have been paid with a remaining 4.3 million people who still have applied for it but haven't heard back or been paid. Although the implementation has been really bad, the surveys that have been carried out show that the grant itself has hugely benefited people who have been lucky enough to receive it. So this is a further case for extending these grants because they're currently temporary in South Africa. But I also wanted to touch on some of the things that Costa said and that we need to spend a little bit more thinking about on the proposal itself and its technical resonances with South Africa. Like I said, the digital divide is a challenge for us. But in my activism, I've learned that we should learn from everyone and copy no one. I think that what's really interesting from your presentation is the multipliers for aggregate demand. And that is also being considered to an extent in South Africa. There are calculations that have been made but we've also come under difficulty and challenges in terms of the ability to claw back through taxation given the universal rollout that we'd hopefully like to have. The three conditions for the kind of big that we would want are briefly a big that is unconditional, that is universal and that is redistributive in its nature. So to just go back to a few of the points that I wanted to raise. The globally the world's largest corporates are making billions at the expense of low-age workers and funneling profits to shareholders and billionaires. A small group of largely white men in rich nations, the richest 22 men in the world own more than all the women in Africa and that is around 325 million people. And how this wealth is generated needs serious accountability. So when we talk about redistribution, we don't just mean it in a local sense. We also mean a global consideration of what redistribution could mean and what our imagination could take us given the portal that we hope the pandemic can be to a better reality. But it makes my stomach turn to think that Jeff Bezos could personally pay each of Amazon's 876,000 employees a one-time $105,000 bonus today and still be as wealthy as he was at the beginning of the pandemic. And Yanis Varoufakis describes a big as a way to civilize this kind of crony capitalism. But to what extent is the big mere reform? And do we want to just civilize capitalism? Of course not, but we have to start somewhere and we can't fight a revolution on an empty stomach. Historically, socialists have supported reforms that are progressive and this is definitely one of those reforms. So as the C-19 People's Coalition and the Cash Transfer Working Group, we have been unequivocal about our support for basic income guarantee. But do we see a UBIG as a way of appropriating wealth that is not providing its social function? And is wealth supposed to provide a social function? For this, the state is essential as it represents the future at the table. At least it should represent the future at the table and in many cases it doesn't. So how are we as a society, as academics, as economists who are progressive going to try and deal and agitate with these realities? In South Africa right now and the world over there are hegemonic ideas that cloud our judgment like the myth of a deserving poor when we know that poverty is structural like the myth that hard work leads to success when we know that unemployment is systemic and even the myth that unemployment is as a result of inadequate education systems. Many people are still extremely tied to the idea of wage labor and only some have come to the realization that they could just be exploited workers with Stockholm syndrome. So we cannot ignore that while big is our best option right now what people really want is still jobs. But the idea of jobs guarantees in South Africa is concerning because we have an extremely corrupt state and money going directly to people is arguably a safer bet. So this contention is very strong in South Africa. While these hegemonies are being questioned and as one of the most unequal countries in the world we really want to use the energy of this moment where people face the possible termination of the new COVID grant that I mentioned was instituted at the beginning of the lockdown to fight for a basic income guarantee. So our demand at the moment is that there can be no termination of the COVID grant or the top ups that have been made to the existing grants without the commitment to a basic income guarantee and it's close to immediate realization. There are technocrats who say that it would take years to implement this but we who have been on the ground and are in communities understand that we can't afford years that it does need to be immediate and that it does need to be taken with urgency. The fact that over five million people at risk of falling below the poverty line if the current grant stops in October should be enough reason to ensure that it continues. The government's reluctance to transform the COVID grant into a permanent basic income exposes really its unimaginative and incorrect viewing of wage labor as the main mechanism for dignified livelihood. And by all accounts in South Africa and across the world wage labor has failed to deliver in South Africa more than half of our population lives below the working poverty line of around $300 per month despite being employed. So contrary to stereotypes of laziness grants have been important in supporting job seeking. For example, by paying for childcare or transport for caregivers or to buy stock to establish or run small businesses which is very common in South Africa. Research has shown that money for social grant is largely spent on food, clothing, transport, healthcare and education with grant recipients still eager to find work. The child support grant for example has reduced hunger and improved school attendance and health but negative views on social assistance are generally more common in established welfare states with lower unemployment rate, better access to services and higher social assistance benefits in South Africa. And I'm sure cost us can weigh in on that. The latest national income dynamics survey the coronavirus rapid mobile survey in South Africa has shown that we really have, hunger has doubled and over and above that the improvement in the economy that we would have hoped to see after the lowering of the highest lockdown restrictions has not actually been achieved. So the crisis is far from over. But when we think about basic income guarantees and I'm heading towards my conclusion here there are two questions that come to mind. The first one is who will benefit from it? And the second is where's the wealth that is going to pay for it coming from? And both of you have touched on this but I think what is also equally important is where the demand itself comes from. And this is where the political mobilization is really crucial. So there are obvious challenges among civil society agreeing on a number has been challenged but suggestions have ranged from the upper bound poverty line of around $76 to $119 which is closer to the minimum wage but not quite there. And of course the ruling party's political branches have also been weighing in on this quite heavily. And their suggestion is a meager amount that is below the food poverty line of $29. So we're all aware of the fact that while even a very small amount still benefits people on the margins the transformative power of a big is really in it being sufficient. And so if it's very low that is the challenge for how we can justify that it is not just the kind of big that Walmart or Elon Musk are supporters of. And unfortunately it seems like our political elite still believes that grants create dependency. So that being said, the big like Ruth has said is not a silver bullet. And we specifically been saying that we would like a basic income guarantee and not a grant because the language is so important. A guarantee reiterates everyone's moral and social right to the economy through a redistributive justice framework. A big will have to be financed of course by taxing the rich, but we'll also have to form part of a broader plan for restructuring the economy with a focus on radical and targeted industrial policy, human development, strong accessible public services. We've had a situation in South Africa where people use their grant money to buy clean water. That is just something that we cannot continue to justify. And the way the pandemic has impacted on society, increasing poverty and unemployment makes the big and urgent necessity now. And lastly, in South Africa, there talks of a solidarity fund which would come from the richest of the population. And it's similar to what you suggested cost us that is conversations that are happening there. But globally COVID-19 pandemic profits tax is something that Oxfam has spoken about. And I think it is a proposal that is quite interesting. One thing that I'm wary of is the idea that we need to recover because it implies that we go back to where we were before. And that is definitely not where we need to go. So many of us can hopefully agree that the pandemic must be a catalyst for reigning in corporate power, restructuring business, holding the state accountable. And most importantly, I think in our situation delinking the obsession with wage work and dignified livelihoods. And this also needs to take into consideration things like odious debt and the unequal ecological exchanges which have centered the destructive economic growth that we have seen to chart the new path going forward. And I'll stop there. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Sharia. That was very interesting. And you touched upon a lot of different aspects. I think that both cost us and rules can come back to. So I would just hand over real quick to Ruth and then to cost us for just a quick response to what Shaira was raising. And then we go to the questions. So Ruth, just really quick though. So we have, because we only have 18 minutes left. Yeah. And I think Shaira really raised great questions and I don't necessarily have anything to add. I'd be interested in hearing from others. Great. Thanks, Costas. Yeah, I mean, I obviously agree with most of these points. There's no question that the primary concern of forces I wish to bring change should be the creation of employment, minimum wages, conditions of labor, productive restructuring, productive economy that improves the productivity of labor, greater equality, the usual stuff, welfare provision. None of that should be supplanted by policies of this type. And as you know, there's a big debate on UBI and UBI can also be advocated by some very, how shall I put this, unlikeable people who have got different names. And some of the uses to which these cash transfers have been put in developing countries are very, very problematic, as Ruth mentioned already in the case of Mozambique. So one has to be very, very careful and recognize the debates that they've occurred and use them in the context of the pandemic crisis if appropriately hedged, if thought through, then there is room for a scope for a policy of this type to deal with the extraordinary impact of poverty and impoverishment in the Southern periphery of Europe, nevermind elsewhere, where incomes are already low. Now, having said this, the capacity for delivery of a program such as the one that I've outlined is of course, very variable and very different in some developing countries compared to Spain, where the ability to provide welfare services are at a different level, but also the ability to manage a complex digital system such as the one that I've outlined is, again, at a different level, say to Mozambique or even to South Africa. So one has to take all these things into account, but a debate is what the left needs because it's been absent, really, from the debates of what's been happening with coronavirus and that's an important issue. And the last point I want to make is the point again that Saera made. It must be connected to tax reform because otherwise it's like saying that this is the magic money tree. I know some among the radicals believe that the magic money tree has been discovered, but I tell you they hasn't. So there has to be tax reform and we've estimated what it is in the case of Spain. In that way, there has to be a shift of resources. There is no free lunch in this way. Some must go to support that. And that must be, of course, the better off the rich. Their wealth must be taxed. Corporates must face taxation. The higher income brackets must face taxation. Otherwise, such a policy becomes difficult to sustain in the medium term. Thank you very much, Kostas. There were a few questions in the chat box about financing and financing universal basic income. So maybe we can talk about that a little bit. Then Neil raised the point that the stock market seems to be completely divorced from realities, that the point that Kostas was also making about financialization, the point that also Sharia was making about the way in which Amazon and others have largely benefited from this crisis whereas others, specifically workers in the North as well as in the South have not. And I think here as well, and maybe the next question can go to Ruth, is the question of creating fiscal policy space in this financialized global economy that has created additional burdens on the debt of global South countries specifically. So how within this new reality in which we find ourselves in, can we create specifically in the global South enough fiscal policy space in this current context with rising debt levels and sort of a credit crunch almost for countries in the global South. And another question that was raised by Rebecca, I think it was Rebecca about, no, sorry, that was Cecilia's question about sort of how to think about universal basic income on a more global level as well. So she asked, how can we push that on, for example, on the UN level, UNCTAD maybe one of the organizations that could help with that, but also maybe for Kostas, would it make more sense to push for universal basic income on a European level that just focus on Spain as such? So these questions may be interesting and they came out of the chat box to some extent and then we'll come to the question on universal basic services after that. So maybe start with Ruth on the financing for the global South. Yeah, great. Thank you for those questions. So if you take the case of Mozambique, it's opted as many African countries have for resource-driven development models, right? And the bulk of private investment in Mozambique goes to the extractive sector and associated infrastructure. And following the financial crisis, you saw a proliferation of private partnerships around infrastructure projects related with the speculative boom around coal and gas in Mozambique, right? Roads and railroads and things being built and displacing much of the infrastructure and services that were there to support people in everyday life. So an example is the investments that went into the Val railway that takes coal to the port and then passenger traffic being completely derailed and with it all the forms of little trade that happened along that railroad. And Mozambique through public-private partnerships actually incurred a huge amount of public debt, but hidden debt, right? That it wasn't clearly visible until the debt crisis. So I think that what we've seen is that the Mozambique's own development strategy is one that's centered on sectors that don't produce jobs, it's highly capital intensive and contributing little to the fiscals because of all fiscal exemptions that they get in order to invest in the country in this kind of rat race to get investment. So I think that we need to be thinking about beyond, right? This resource-driven model and redefining the terms of foreign investment and how it comes into the country. And I think that someone raised the question around tax agreements and certainly global tax agreements are something that we have to think about because these corporations are of a global dimension and money is moved all over the place and oftentimes not even coming into the country. So I think I will leave it there. Thank you. To Kostas and also the question was raised, maybe that also relates to what I said about the European level if it would be more feasible in Scandinavian countries, Mao asked that question. So maybe you can also- Yeah, let me take these questions quickly. I know we're running out of time. The question asked by I believe Rebecca on universal basic services. In principle, I'm in favor of universal basic services. I'm in favor of provision in terms of use values, in terms of material things, in terms of free access to people, to the health system, to transport and so on. In principle, I'm in favor of that. That would be a more equitable way that avoids the intervention of money which can create problems as well as being fungible, of course, because money is fungible. So in principle, I'm in favor of that indeed. However, we are facing a major problem which is actually an immediate problem. This is going to be a very difficult time coming up in Europe and a very difficult time coming up in a number of countries. I mean, it's going to be a difficult winter for a lot of people. So the policies we're advocating and we've estimated were from May to December of this year. So we're thinking of this as an immediate intervention question tomorrow. This is if we decided upon it, it could happen tomorrow. Now, whether we sustain it in the longer term, that's a different question. That's what we need to discuss. That's what we need to engage in a discussion of. Whether it makes sense and to what extent does it make sense together with other interventions. Now, the point that Mao made about implementing it more easily in some welfare states, it's possible. We'd have to look at it concretely in the concrete. But certainly Scandinavian countries, what I know about them, which isn't that much, I've got the capacity to deliver such a program and to combine it with provision and kind. The point then that Cecilia made on financing basic income, given the interconnectedness of the global economy and the question of Europe. If you expect the European Union to provide adequate basic income for the South and to provide it on a sort of European uniform basis, you'd wait a long time. The crisis will be long over and so we'll be half the South before that happens. The issue here is to intervene quickly and the power that's in Europe right now is the nation state, as it has demonstrated. It's happening also in Germany as it happens, which is running at the moment from what I understand pilot programs in basic income provision. And we wait to see what will be decided. Now, for financing it, it still is within the powers of the state of tax. That hasn't gone away. It still is within the powers of the state of tax and the global dimension doesn't really come into it that much. The state can tax to do it. It can rearrange a system. It can bring about an income transfer from the rich to the poorer by advocating tax reform, by introducing tax reform and imposing it. It's a matter of political wills can nothing to do with international impediments or anything of the sort. And finally, the question by Max on then this is proposal to tax employees. It is of course true that if you provide basic income, you're given an excuse or a way for as group you less employers and there are plenty of those about to undercut wages, not to pay wages. And that has happened in the course of the pandemic crisis. We know of a lot of anecdotal evidence that people have not been paid by their enterprises because when they were supposed to be paid. So it happens and it will happen. How you tackle that, it will depend. I haven't done the figures for the proposal by Sanders. I don't know. I can't tell you I would work, but in principle, yes, I would be in favor of regulatory intervention to make sure that the employers do not take advantage of basic income provision, not to pay the wages that they were supposed to pay. That is not an easy thing. So although UBI could be easy to introduce in terms of the way that we propose in terms of avoiding bureaucratic impediments, everybody could have it as a right or 50% of the population would have it as a right. Yeah, there could be complexities coming later. But no one ever said the social policy is easy. The last one I would make is this. We can think of UBI as social policy and you'd be right to do so. But the ones that are made as well here and the simulations we did indicated it. It isn't just equality policy or welfare policy. It is also aggregate demand policy. There's also dimension of boosting aggregate demand, which in the case of the South is very, very important. Our simulations, simple as they are, based on an estimate of multiplier, which is reasonable, indicate that such a policy would ameliorate the recession or impact of the crisis very substantially in the case of Spain, possibly elsewhere in the South of Europe. Thank you very much, Kostas. Also, I would like to ask Sharira for her view on financing, specifically you brought in the dimension as well, this global dimension of redistribution. You mentioned the sort of racialized gendered global workforce as an important aspect to think about the global dimension of redistribution. So maybe you can go into that a little bit further and specifically on how to finance universal basic income, given the sort of reduced fiscal policy space that might now be found also in South Africa. Yeah, I mean, I won't take too long on this one because I do think it's an area that we're all kind of putting our heads together in. What I will say is that when it comes to the conceptions of redistributive justice, and from a South African perspective, there's a lot to say about land redistribution, about the importance of those mechanisms that have been so neglected in our democratic transition. And there's also the importance of Africa as a continent being exploited globally. And that is where the unequal ecological exchange issue comes into play. I would say that if we were to be honest about issues around debt, there's a question around odious debt when it comes to our public power utility SCOM, for example, and the loans that were taken from the World Bank. It's interesting to me that those loans were admitted by the World Bank to be corrupt loans that should never have actually been approved and that would qualify as odious debt. And there are mechanisms to, for example, newly, I think, sue the World Bank, but these are not conversations that you see taking place across the globe. And it's interesting to me because it shows our limitations of how we think about redistributive justice and how comfortable we make it for political and global elites, both locally and across the board, to continue the status quo. And as an activist, I think that these are conversations we need to start having more. I know in South Africa, when it comes to the growing reservations around austerity, there's an important legislative opportunity that public interest law organizations are considering on how we can use the constitution and try and do that. But again, it is very limited to our own national disposition. And I do think that when we think about the coronavirus pandemic, it's made us realize just how connected we all are. And it also has to make us realize that when it comes to think of vaccine, when it comes to practical issues like fixing the patent laws and ensuring that African countries don't kind of just get thrown into the backdrop again and are having to pay much more than required to access life-saving medications. These are all things that we consider in a fiscal conversation about how we'd be able to firstly, free up money to afford a pig and secondly, have some form of redistributive justice that isn't just located in our own geographical compound. Thank you very much for this. I, we are running out of time. And also, this is a good way to, I think to end this session for today, unless Ruth, you have anything burning to say any conclusion that you want to draw? No, no, no. No, no, no. Great. Well, first and foremost, let me thank you so much for this very, very interesting, these interesting presentation and the interesting discussion that we had. I learned a lot, certainly. And also, it already foreshadows a lot of the things that we will discuss in the webinar series, particularly the role of the World Bank that Shaira at the end pointed towards is our discussion next week, where we have a panel discussion exactly on that, sort of the World Bank response to COVID-19 entitled Never Let a Pandemic Go to Waste, where we have several speakers from our department and from U.E. Bristol and the Nawee Antifem Macro Economics Collective. So please also join us next week when we speak more about that. But more generally, how this discussion also showed that there is this global dimension to this current crisis. And there have to be global responses to a more just and environmental sustainable future coming out of this crisis. And this is exactly something that we want to sort of help to shape this discourse with this webinar series. And it was a fantastic way to start. So thank you, thank you very much again to all speakers. And just to quote Shaira, we can't fight a revolution on empty stomach. So please enjoy your dinner or lunches or breakfast from wherever you join us today. And we do hope that we see you next week. So thank you very much for joining and goodbye now. Thank you.