 Oh yes, I'm hearing you. Okay, cool. Let's get going then. I'm having some problems with my video so I'll just be in on voice only. My name is Julian Boyes, a PhD student in the SOAS Economics Department. Welcome everyone to this latest webinar in the series co-organized by the SOAS Department of Economics and the SOAS Open Economics Forum. You can follow the OEF and the SOAS Economics on social media and use the hashtag economics of COVID if you want to tweet about today's event. We are delighted to have Keston Perry with us today to speak about the impact of the COVID crisis on the resource exporting economies. Just to briefly introduce Keston, he worked in government and as a consultant for international organizations before completing his PhD at SOAS as well. He is now a lecturer in Economics at the University of the West of England and his research interests include industrial energy policy in resource rich countries with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean in particular. He has an excellent recent paper on Haiti which you should all check out and I'm really looking forward to hearing him speak today. He'll speak for about half an hour and feel free to write any questions you have in the chat box as we go along and we'll collect those and put them to Keston at the end in the final half hour and have some time for discussion and on those. So yeah, take it away Keston. Thank you very much. Thank you Julian. I'm actually waiting for today's question today. We are in a very peculiar period I guess maybe in global history I don't want to be too presumptuous but we are in a very difficult period and as a Black academic and as a human being I think it's important to recognize what is happening right now in the United States also here in the United Kingdom. I don't think we could have a discussion today like this without offering some form of solidarity with Black men and women who have experienced racial, anti-Black racial violence and who face like myself, face the specter of white supremacy that is plaguing the world at the moment. Having worked in the United States list and much of my family residing in the United States and the Caribbean and having had experiences as marginalized worker, as a member of the LGBT community, as a working class scholar and immigrant in the United Kingdom, I think it's crucial we reflect on the current moment which demands all of our attention. George Floyd and Armad Arbery were both brutally killed at the hands of police in the United States recently. In the UK we know also well the countless number of Black people held in police custody who have met their deaths prematurely, perpetrators of which have got off court free without prosecution. Belly Mujinga who was on duty as a train station worker met her death after being exposed to the coronavirus as a Black woman and mother. We cannot say for sure what the without release of video evidence and reports of the investigations by British Transport Police. It is awfully painful yet many questions and serious concerns are outstanding in this matter. We cannot ignore the just released report showing Black and ethnic minority people are dying at disproportionate rates from COVID-19. These are all parts of the same issue of Black working class people facing a global pandemic and anti-Black racism and injustice. Anti-Black racism is also a global pandemic. We cannot simply claim in solidarity or send thoughts and prayers but as economists, as members of society, as members of a global community, we must work towards not only diagnosing and understanding these problems but dismantling the systems and structures that exist in every sphere of social life that lead to the untimely death and violence meted out by the States against Black people here in the UK and in the United States. That caused many of us to live shorter lives, have fewer opportunities, less support from institutions of States and less justice. Being Black and working class in these societies can get us killed no matter how well educated or high skilled we might claim to be. To invoke Angela Davis in a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist according to James Baldwin how much more time do Black people have to wait to get justice. I want us to take a moment to just reflect on those words and understand the subtle ways or not so subtle ways that each of us might be contributing to this particular problem. So I want to now get into today's talk. I'm going to share with you today how I look at the current moment in commodity dependent economies. UNGTA defines a country as dependent on commodities that's the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. As those countries where commodities account for the 60% of total merchandise exports. In its 2019 State of Commodity Dependence report, UNGTA shows commodity dependent countries increased between 1998 and 2002 from 92 to 102. Between or to 92 to 102 between 1998 to 2002 they now stand at in 2007 about 102 of 189 of the world's countries or two-thirds of developing countries which are reliant on commodity exports. Commodities include items or articles like wheat, grains and agricultural products to minerals like iron ore and copper to fossil fuel energy like coal, petroleum, oil and natural gas. I'm mostly concerned here today with the latter two set of commodities and the interaction global political economy dynamics and internal political and institutional structures. I think there's a really interesting report by the Food and Agricultural Organization on agricultural products and the effects of COVID-19 on the agricultural sector across the world. It's called tunnels of the transmission to food and agriculture. I want to point out as well I differ somewhat from UNGTA and other scholars regarding some of the determinisms their spouse associated with commodity and dependence. As I show in a recent paper which is on the review at the moment that compares the performance trajectories of two national oil companies in Bolivia and Trinidad and Tobago since 2011. I agree however that commodity dependence has implications for long-term development. Even before COVID-19 there were several significant vulnerabilities to which these countries were exposed. Since commodity exports are the primary means of foreign exchange earnings which are currently drying up with little access to new facilities like dollar liquidity swap lines that have been opened up to a few countries. Not many of commodity dependent countries for various reasons. I think the most prominent of which is the fact that they're prone to macroeconomic volatility and there's a low level of confidence among big-dollar investors. Only Brazil so far as I understand among this group has been welcome to this very exclusive club of swap line recipients. Finally specialization in resource-driven exports also creates exposure to macroeconomics instability and erratic revenues that COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated. Oil and commodity prices have sharply declined. Oil prices have declined by more than 50% while most metal and mineral prices declined by about 20% or more in the last couple of months. New analysis released just last week by UNTAD is showing that commodity exports to China could plummet by US$15.5 billion to US$33.1 billion in 2020. That's a drop of 46% compared with annual growth forecasts. This major decline is projected to be between US$2.9 billion and US$7.9 billion which would constitute a 9% loss in terms of annual growth rate in those countries relying on primary goods exports. I want to now present a few empirical observations or rather perhaps provocations with respect to the situation of commodity-dependent countries before and after COVID-19 that have reinforced and highlighted not only the need for urgent action, it underscores the critical importance of new kinds of scholarly interpretation and inquiry, explanation and revisiting some of the older theories in development economics and ideas with some contemporary relevance and important updates. I will cover three empirical themes which I refer as the triple threat crisis and realities that have converged and negatively that are negatively convulsing these commodity dependent countries today. The first is debt and financialization. The next is what I call an existential demand crisis. The third is the looming specter of the climate crisis applications thereof. I will not draw or offer any particular policy recommendations because it is my firm view that these matters are for consideration and part of broader political and deliberate and democratic consideration over which I think an academic cannot be presumptuous to claim any intellectual advantage. Debt and financialization. Since the global financial crisis of 2008 and especially after the 2014 commodity slump, debt has been worsening in the political realities of many of these countries. Between 2008 and 2017, external debt of 17 commodity-dependent countries increased by more than 25 percent of gross domestic product. In Mongolia, which is an extreme case, the ratio of debt to GDP skyrocketed from 39 percent to 245 percent of GDP. Heavily indebted exporters of primary resource products are likely to be on the front line of debt-related pressures from the spread of the coronavirus, particularly in the face of declining foreign exchange reserves. Mongolia, Angola, Gabo, and Zambia face worsening debt positions and exporters. Debt exceeds 100 percent of GDP in Djibouti, Eritrea, Mozambique, Republic of Congo, and Sudan. After 2008, interest rates fell close to zero that enabled many commodity exporters to take on additional government debt that increased from 51.1 percent from 2008 to 62.1 percent in 2009. On average, debt to GDP in African commodity exporters increased from 4.6 percent to 57.8 percent of GDP. Sorry, let me repeat that. Additional government debt in African exporting countries increased from 51.1 to 62.1 percent from 2008 to 2009. And in Latin America, commodity exporters increased from 48.6 to 57.8 percent. Before the coronavirus, international currency reserves had been growing at a higher annual rate than short-term debt. The 2017 UNTAD report indicated that debt levels were returning to levels not seen since the 1980s, during which, of course, you would know many of these countries, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, experienced major debt crises. After the global financial crisis, storing up international foreign currency reserves was used as a mechanism for self-insurance against downturns and having net-diverted resources away from basic public goods provision, larger public investments, long-term fiscal outlays in diversification projects. Despite a pickup since 2016 in these reserves, as commodity prices had momentarily stabilized, the current levels of reserves show reduced capacity in these countries managed COVID-19 external shock. Much of the growth in reserves occurred through boring rather than through export revenue increases. Many of these countries have experienced a rapid build-up of private debt in reserve currencies and increased penetration of their markets by non-resident investors, foreign commercial banks, and other financial intermediaries, as well as allowing the allowance of their own residents to invest freely abroad. There are several mechanisms via which this has been occurring. In the case of Chile and Trinidad and Tobago, though the report by UNTAD just released last week shows in the case of copper, Chile may experience or recover faster than the other mineral categories or even oil and natural gas. This is because of the potential demand increase that the forecast will happen in China. However, Chile is also experiencing a social crisis and a political crisis to some degree and so that would have certain nuance effects in Chile. In a recent paper, I have argued that, which is also under review, that the Inter-American Development Bank, which is the largest multilateral creditor to the region, have used a mixture of cart and stick measures to promote a variety of or the accumulation through the variety of financial and debt instruments. There has been also a strong shift in the ownership of government, central government debt, including public external debt from official to private creditors and several commodity index traders that have become more prominent since 2008. These trends worsen developing countries' external vulnerabilities and involve large transfers of resources to advanced economies, wall street investors through various financial channels. You can imagine the class particular dynamics of this increased transfer to wall street and so on in that financial elites, global financial elites are profiting to some degree from increased debt indebtedness and potentially whatever additional debt is going to come from the coronavirus situation. External demand crisis. One of the implications in the last decade we have seen and which COVID-19 pandemic has revealed more than anything is that the demand for hard commodities over time is going to differ sharply from before. Demand for oil has evaporated almost overnight. According to the International Energy Agency, demand is forecast by 2.1 million barrels per day for the first half of 2020. 29 million barrels a day lower than a year ago in April alone and a record of 9.3 million barrels per day lower in 2020 than 2019 as a whole. Before now the International Energy Agency, the IEA, had anticipated a global oil demand which had risen on average by 1.5 million barrels per day each year in the past decade would reach 100 million barrels per day in 2019 and they would only begin this particular increase would only encounter slower growth from the year 2025. Since the second world war this current period is projected to have the largest decline in energy demand of about 6 percent which represents the entire demand equivalent of the economy or seven times the decline after the 2008 global financial crisis. Based on these observations it appears that we have entered a period of existential demand crisis for hard commodities especially fossil fuels. These patterns will be different for various countries depending on the structure of the commodity sectors of course. Countries that rely on fossil fuels as compared to minerals like lithium or iron ore for instance may continue to experience downward demand trends that is of course taken into account how volatile capital flows and financialization affect their capital and institutional structure. In other words those countries with that continue to integrate with the global financial system and architecture or which have reached a point of what I call intensive integration would continue to experience this worsening scenario and worsening prospects. The consistent demand uptake we saw during the 2000s that's from 2000 the year 2000s from maybe 2003 I think is the the time frame to about 2008 and there was an uptake again after the financial crisis in 2009. This is covered in a recent book by Nicholas Jepsen which I think is a really interesting book but I want to suggest that it is not going to return to those levels seen during the 2000s and therefore we can brace for much lower demand for this reason particularly because of trends prior to and since COVID-19. Some scholars have for some time discussed the idea of peak oil demand as an empirical construction of the lives of commodity dependent countries however unlike this particular idea which was coined first by Marion Hubert and it represents a bell curve of rising production and a period of maximum extraction point of petroleum after which there's a tonal decline. I want to complicate this a bit I suggest that an existential demand crisis do not only apply to hydrocarbon resources or is due to an abstract consideration of oils reaching a terminal supply point but it is due to the interaction of global political economic events such as COVID-19 and structures namely as well the increased activism of climate movements the carbonization imperatives which I will elaborate a bit more later on on the one hand and on the other hand the exhaustion of policy maneuvers and internal contestation amongst elites and domestic social actors whose rents are dwindling even faster than ever. So this is what I call the rent space and for fossil fuels it is closing faster to some degree while for minerals I believe it will go through a more dynamic period of increase and then volatility over time. In other words and this is the according to the historical record there's a really interesting paper by Antonio Jose Ocampo in world development in 2014 that shows you the macroeconomic patterns of oil prices over a very long period of time and I'm drawing upon some of his interpretation. In other words the demand crisis facing fossil fuel exporters appears more determinant while for other minerals needed for production in things like electric vehicles is much more contingent. This also reveals a deepening challenge for extractive capitalism in which transnational corporations financial elites and the policy imperatives in the global north further constrain the productive potential of these countries. I will deal with some of the analytical implications this raises a bit later but for a moment I want to expand on this point there are these different differing possibilities between fossil fuel exporters and mineral exporters on the on the one hand and I know that these are not predictions these are possibilities and they would be revealed with the fullness of time and with deeper historical analysis. I want to suggest that it is of major concern for commodity exporters for the very reason that if the challenges fiscal debt and otherwise are worsened by the COVID-19 situation in which commodity prices would not rebound as quickly as happened in 2000 after the 2008 crisis. Commodity dependent economies therefore would need to bear the brunt of this ongoing challenge for some time face worsening credit positions worsening credit positions and bond yields as they confront a long and arduous recovery in the medium and even long term climate crisis the situation of rapid change of existential demand crisis for fossil fuel and mineral exporting economies is inevitably linked to the climate crisis and I want to show how I explore this in a short essay which is currently being reviewed on the impact on the climate crisis for oil and gas based economies the United Nations environment program has suggested in a 2019 report that mineral and hydrocarbon extraction would have to be radically appealed in order to secure below 1.5 degree target for temperature rise to avoid what is going to be possibly a climate catastrophe and climate breakdown under the United Nations framework for climate change what does this mean for commodity dependent countries especially oil and gas and mineral based economies the impact of the climate crisis and I'm going to wrap up soon I know I'm running out of time and I want to have as much interaction as possible the impact of the climate crisis depends represents sorry long-term tendencies in terms of demand and as I've previously indicated but it also but also in terms of the forces of global policy discussions like the global Green New Deal and actions that are both related to financialization and capital flows in these countries for countries that rely on commodities in the oil and gas category in particular there will be major political and economic disruption on account of shifts towards renewable energy that climate activists and major international financial institutions are demanding their varying perspectives I oh their varying perspectives on whether COVID-19 would lead to an expansion in long-term on renewables during this particular period the International Energy Agency has estimated renewable energy could make up about 40% of global electricity generation in 2020 and have a positive effect on reducing CO2 emissions global demand for renewable energy in all sectors have increased by about 1.5% in the first quarter of 2020 year on year renewable energy generation electricity generation rather increased by about 3% owing to completed wind and solar PV projects that's photovoltaic projects in the past year we are uncertain whether these trends would endure another perspective which is a good review which was just released by in energy research and social science by Syed Issan Hosseini suggests that COVID-19 would lead to austerity in many countries and delay implementation of new renewable energy projects he predicts that instead developing countries may switch to lower cost energy products but I think the situation is uncertain they if there's a move to so-called green recovery with limited manufacturing capacity the monetary and fiscal arrangements that are currently in place this would mean that countries in commodity dependent countries would enter into the low value added in solar wind and so on those particular technological domains in any case despite the very low achievement on the past agreement in terms of limiting greenhouse gas emissions across most countries this is advanced economies and developing countries commodity exporters are in a particularly complicated position they generate as much as 60 to 80 percent and in many cases like Nigeria 95 plus percent of government revenues from oil and gas exports which may have to be abandoned in order to achieve the targets under the Paris agreement this means at least 80 percent of all proven fossil fuel reserves will have to be abandoned by these countries so so while activists and I think proponents have largely targeted international oil companies and financial backers of fossil fuel companies the collateral damage actually would be felt in commodity dependent countries especially oil and gas exporters they have not considered how these demands for rapid changes by the green new deal or whatever they want to call it the green recovery and so on and other such policies would affect fossil fuel exporters many of these countries are middle income countries and many of the people living in these countries the populations mostly live in poverty experience extreme poverty conditions there's little attention being paid to these particular concerns because of socio political structures sunk investments some capital investments limited manufacturing capacity infrastruct institutional infrastructures reduced falls fiscal policy space on account of financialization and other such constraints commodity exporting nations have been unable to to grow renewable energy sectors their investments in renewable energy sectors both private and public are quite negligible and there's an interesting paper by Lucy Baker on South Africa with respect to this and on Ecuador by Guillaume Fontaine in energy research and social science and their their investments are largely based on speculative investments which means if there is some sort of calamity many of these speculative investors would as they have during COVID-19 would wash out and leave those countries in particular dire streets so many commodity dependent countries because of their increased integration into global financial architecture this is more pronounced I think in Latin America and Caribbean than Africa or sub-Saharan Africa and they have not been able to be able to take advantage of this so-called renewable energy revolution that many of the green new dealers are promoting as beneficial to all countries across the world this is not just this is just not the case the insertion in global the global economy through monetary financial and other institutional channels have created massive vulnerability and volatility that in this able them using domestic capital renewable energy investments I have been hard pressed to find any oil and gas producing country which has been successful in renewable energy expansion but there's a very interesting proposition that I want to to point out before I come to receive your questions by scholars some on the left and some not so much on the left scholars Chris Armstrong in political studies Lazarus and van welts in climatic change those are the journals have suggested that compensation be paid to commodity producers for leaving oil and gas assets in the ground the question about how what you offer compensation for stranded oil assets alone do you offer it for the level of poverty in those countries do you offer it for the opportunity costs of demand or for the productive fields or the non-proven reserves or proven reserve sorry the development needs of those countries or what is required in terms of building a productive economy or to meet the basic needs of those populations remain largely unanswered in any case there are many problems with this particular measure principle among which is that they create new structural dependencies they reduce autonomy even further and reduce democratic accountability to upon which those countries can forge a future on their own terms it's like if you put an entire country on the dole what would be considered more equitable more rewarding and more just for these countries cannot be left up to the devices of industrialized nations that have brought us to the brink of climate breakdown this approach requires developing countries now to stunt whatever particular chances they might have for meeting their basic needs of their population by exploiting their own resources so i'm not going to i'm going to end um you can whatever questions you might have i'm going to say these final words um i think one thing is certain as a result of COVID-19 which has thrown up a great deal of uncertainty regarding what lies ahead for commodity dependent countries it has accelerated a deepening demand crisis has brought ahead that explosion and vulnerabilities in financial as a result of financial integration that many of these countries face and they have been both victims and active participants in this more than this the climate crisis unleashes medium-term long-run and contingent difficulties that commodity producers must face overall these many moving off an opportunity to revisit important long-standing theoretical insights with appropriate reformulations from scholars in both the dependency and structuralist Latin America structuralist schools such as well-prebished, Norman Governe, Lloyd Best, Celso Futado, Kari Levitt among others whom economic economic sorry and the development field seem to have long forgotten all right so that is all i am going to say um for now and i'm going to ask for your questions thanks very much Keston that was a really great talk um thanks very much as well for your initial opening comments about the ongoing racism pandemic and the it's latest expression with the killing of George Floyd um obviously the historical structures of racist oppression such as slavery and colonialism are closely linked to the economic situation today of the resource exorting countries so one thing i was thinking as you were talking was was wanting to hear a bit more about the link between those and um thinking about how um the acceleration of the stranding of assets of resource rich countries um is affected by covid and and the the increased need need for a green transition um and i'm just thinking about you mentioned some of the aspects of the global financial architecture which um which mitigate against integrating these countries into a kind of green new deal or green kind of energy transition at the global level so um i'm just trying to bring all these things together in my head i'm interested to hear your thoughts about how this kind of transition can be can happen in a socially equitable way addressing some of some of the historical injustices that that you've mentioned and part of this story um the question um julian i think um it's a it's a difficult one because i think one of the insights we can draw upon from development economics is the fact that development or those kinds of rapid industrial structural changes happening in in countries must be based on those countries determining their own futures it must be based on self-determination it also must be based on not a sort of vapid or vacuous internationalism that i think has been emanating from much of the discussion from the our degree new deal it has to be based on legitimate democratic uh consideration of countries which are at the forefront of not being able to make that transition it also has to be based on and which is something i i discussed in a policy report that i produced earlier this year we have to talk about climate reparations we have to talk about reparations uh without discussion on uh compensation and repayment not in the same compensation not the same compensation as the scholars i've mentioned talks about but are not based on aid which is often associated with charity here in united kingdom that you know we have these countries majority wide countries being very nice and charitable to developing countries but it has to be based on justice and the fact that recognition that colonialism i mean this is a nasty word oftentimes in both scholarly circles and in policy circles but colonialism uh and uh it's many manifestations it has to be based on recognition of that of the justice of the injustices associated with that and reparations have to be paid to those countries in order to meet some of their own development objectives thank you thank you very much for that yeah to hear about climate reparations and good to put that on the agenda um just coming to some questions from the the chat there um richard asks about the from the potential of from the perspective of not and not such an internationalist kind of perspective so from from looking from a commodity dependent country as you've mentioned that the demand shock is is is difficult and the transition they face to alternative economic diversification strategies is hard so what what what strategies are there available to them have there been other countries that have been more successful what have they done and what are any of those strategies appropriate today do you think um i have been avoiding talking about policy um implications because i think i am no better than um those country's populations themselves to determine what policies they adopt but what i would say with respect to that is um we i think we have to take some historical lessons really really um importantly on board historical lessons from the 1970s and 80s so the oil um um put you say economy export opec countries um in 1970s and 80s put was able to utilize some level of power so that countries uh can uh utilize at the point in time the the commodity crisis that we experienced in the early 1970s in order to invest in not state enterprises in order to invest in their public sectors in order to invest in their um social welfare regimes and so on with distribution and so on and they were able to utilize the space that was created by that particular crisis in order to do many of those things as we know what happened with opec and opec is now more or less apart from Saudi Arabia um is not as powerful as it used to be because as i mentioned what has happened the financial integration that has happened since the 70s and so on um in which uh american capitalism has come board uh come out on top sorry um compared to other countries who which which are really um experiencing great difficulty um i think we have to take some historical lessons on board we have to sort of reinterpret some of the what has gone on in the past and opec which is seen as a bad player in the global economy um we have to sort of think about that again and understand what has happened what happened in that period to allow a a little more autonomous approach to development compared to what's happening now i think it is it is bleak so one of the the questions was that it is bleak um i have i i don't know what is going to happen i'm not going to increase i'm just to say that um they have been in the 2000 so brazil i think a good paper by ilia salami shows brazil has been able to use some form of capital control um in order to address the outflow of of capital but the challenge with that is is that that's tweaking around the you know around the edges as opposed to the sort of systemic and emancipatory change that many of these countries need to get out of the the pattern of cyclical uh business site or business cycles and the perturbations that are associated with them thanks for that um we have another question from a couple of questions from from farbagh um she asked up so you can see there can you speak a little about the variations within commodity dependent countries in relation to the rent space that you mentioned perhaps just elaborate on that concept a bit and how it links to the discussion and then uh again coming back um what do you think about the degrowth the idea of degrowth and how does that does that provide any um potential uh positive prospects for resource exporters all right uh first question with respect to the rent space being um shrunk at the moment as a result of the the reduced amount of rents as a result of the outflow of capital and so on the limited ability for countries to extract rents from big multinational corporations or transnational corporations i think in the current COVID-19 situation it's becoming even much more constrained and that has two effects so one the at a domestic political economy level uh elites are hard pressed not to be able to they don't have access to those rents they there's no there are fewer rents for them to to contest so they are actually in competition with each other for the very few rents that or the dwindling rent space that exists and that can lead into i think into depending on the structure of those economies uh into serious problems like corruption um like uh a sort of rentia sort of dynamic which which i point out historically has not been the case and i point i i i refer to this 1970s early 80s where rents were used in a much more i think productive way in some of those commodity exporting countries um uh the other question was could you remind me yeah it was about degrowth uh if you have stranded assets i have very very huge amount of skepticism with respect to degrowth um i think many of its proponents um and i saw a recent people that i read that i had really serious problems with um it sounds like a lot of principles and and a lot of um ideas about decolonization and all these kinds of very interesting ideas or at least this particular paper but it does not actually offer a very succinct program and this is covered in a in a uh Robert Pollan mentions addresses this in an article in a review of article political economics it does not offer a program um it is not historically rooted in any sort of development project it is also not it does not create it does not it's a large extent does not actually refer to developing countries um it refers to mostly advanced industrialized countries and the fact that it makes so ignores consideration for developing countries means that it is a tool for further subordination of the aspirations of populations in developing countries and it is also um uh red herring to some degree for um to not take this sort of um overhaul reform that is required of the international financial system that creates these kinds of vulnerabilities and and and subjugate certain um developing countries thank you um we had a couple of questions from Kieran about the data sources that you were using in your talk perhaps you could just uh point point them to so what i can do by one hi julian it's anna for events here um janice has just told me that you are having some technical issues is there anything i can help with i yeah it just uh cut out i think um looks like everyone left us now kind of rejoining okay we've lost keston so i guess we're just i might see keston rejoining yeah right sorry about that i'm not sure what would have caused that no problem these things happen okay sounds like we're back online yeah i think my connector was lost okay all right um well as long as you're both back online you have what you need i can see janice's back um have most of your participants been able to rejoin is is that about the number that we're online before 20 i think we had about double that before so okay enough of combat all right so maybe we can give it a few more minutes um yeah depending on how much time you have yeah we only have a couple of minutes left so perhaps if we continue with the last few questions sure yeah all right sorry about that i hope it's straightened up now great so keston i was just asking about the the sources of data and the any issues with untransmethodology and perhaps i can ask you um sarah's last question as well just for the last few minutes um she asked how how do you think that dependency theory can be employed to analyze existing and emerging differences among resource exporting countries in the context and aftermath of covid i think there is um some definitely some possibility for it to be used and applied um i think there need to be there definitely needs to be some reconstructions reformulations updates that are done especially with respect to taking the domestic political economy economy more into account um and i think one particular mechanism i think we can utilize is rent as a way to uh as an analytical device to discuss this and and and complicate it and problematize it a little more um that makes it a lot more applicable um to the current situation given the kind of globalization of finance and the financialization that has happened um i think that's um how we might look at it now thank you and um any other and there was a question about the source of data that you used um right so i was i was talking into the ether when oh right so yeah oh no it's fine uh right so i utilize uh i've quite a few reports from unctad from the united nations conference and trade and development um some articles from a lot of different sources what i can do i can compile them and i can send them to sarah and the team and i can point out um yeah so i can have them made it make it available to those who would be interested in in in following up thank you and we're just coming to the end now we have a few more minutes there was one uh final comment from uh kiran saying he attended the vienna degrowth conference and he saw that there was efforts to seek north south alliances in order to not reproduce new colonial proposals for radical social ecological transformations um but there's much more work to be done um perhaps i could just ask one last question about you mentioned rents and decreasing availability of rents from resource exports um and the awareness of the need to transit towards the more diversified economies do you see that those that's going going well potentially for some countries in terms of looking more towards industrialization and particularly green industrialization do you have any kind of i don't know um i have been hard pressed to find many resource rich countries developing countries that are and and this is because of the constraints that they face and i mean in some cases between 60, 80, 95 percent of the exports currently come from um you know resource exports so 95 percent are of revenues come from resource exports so it's a challenge to how do they use fiscal measures to be able to to transform in addition to facing the domestic political economy constraints of where elites that are tied to oil and and incumbent sectors are unable to give up um or unwilling to give up some of their their economic and social power um and they're not challenged by a very effective um coalition to be to do that so it's i think it is a very it's a big it's a big challenge um i think it is not impossible but i think there needs there definitely need to be major reforms it i think there is a possibility to use COVID-19 to you know ramp up domestic productive capacity and i think that might be some sort of way prism through which some of these things can be achieved but without these sort of fiscal resources to be able to do that it makes it that much more difficult um but i think there is some space that is provided by COVID-19 for industrial policy um to be used um in creative ways i think that might rapidly it as you know things change i want to make one more comment about the reproducing new colonial polls um i think that could be that that is interesting um and i'm open to see some more information about that i remain skeptical in so far as many of these ideas are not grounded in the realities of developing countries they're not grounded in the experiences of latin american and caribbean countries which have um in various ways been radical proponents of um environmentalism or radical um proposed um you know have proposed and utilized radical solutions in the environmental space they're not and so that is where from an intellectual and uh level um and even from a cosmological metaphysical level it is not these ideas that that are often um you know created in the north do not actually speak to those particular realities so i think we have to be very careful about about you know they speak the rhetoric of um you know appending colonial um sort of hierarchies and and and so on and be a lot more critical about that okay thank you very much we have to leave it there um but thanks so much for your your presentation and and the discussion i've gained a lot from it i'm sure everyone else has too um this webinar should be available online for people to to catch up with afterwards and as our previous talks in this series and i just encourage people to tune into the forthcoming talks by alfredo sardafilu and dongo samba siala um he'll be talking about crises of global neoliberalism and uh the africa rising narrative uh respectively so yeah they tuned and uh stay well everyone and look forward to future discussions thank you very much it was my pleasure thank you very much to the organizers for the opportunity and i hope everyone takes care