Suchergebnisse

This paper studies Ramsey-optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian 2-country open economy framework, which is used to assess how far fiscal policy can substitute for the role of nominal exchange rates within a monetary union. Giving up exchange rate flexibility leads to welfare costs that depend significantly on whether the law of one price holds internationally or whether firms can engage in pricing-tomarket. Calibrated to the euro area, the welfare costs can be reduced by 86% in the former and by 69% in the latter case by using only one tax instrument per country. Fiscal devaluations can be observed as an optimal policy in a monetary union: if a nominal devaluation of the domestic currency were optimal under flexible exchange rates, optimal fiscal policy in a monetary union is an increase of the domestic relative to the foreign value added tax.

The most recent Global Mercury Assessment estimates that human-made mercury releases are approximately 2,220 tons per year and that a significant source is artisanal and small-scale gold mining (UNEP 2019). The ubiquity of mercury and its negative effects on human health and the environment have given rise to mercury governance schemes at different administrative scales, and Colombia banned the substance from mining in 2018. This ban is depicted as protecting the environment and human health from toxic mercury, but it has been highly contested within artisanal and small-scale gold mining communities. This contribution will show that the contestations of the mercury ban are intimately related to the deeply political and representational qualities of mercury held by artisanal and small-scale gold producers. Hence, mercury governance has become an important dimension of a broader negotiation over the place of historically marginalized and increasingly criminalized artisanal and small-scale gold producers in contemporary extractivism. The combination of legal framework analysis with semi-structured interviews and ethnographic work in two gold mining towns in Colombia provides a more nuanced and politicized understanding of local opposition to mercury governance that moves beyond simplistic assumptions about mercury users and their contaminated bodies.