PEF Council member Prof. Stephany Griffiths-Jones is a member of Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s group of economic advisors. With Boric winning a resounding victory in the Chilean Presidential elections, we reproduce here a translation of Stephany’s recent interview for CTIX magazine Chile. Conducted before the second round of the election, Stephany discusses the left’s economic programme for the country, and the challenges a new President is likely to face.

Interview conducted by Andy Robinson. Original (in Spanish).

Stephany Griffith-Jones, one of the most eloquent promoters of the role of the state and public banks in the equitable development of South American economies, joined a group of advisers to Gabriel Boric, Chile’s presidential candidate, before the start of his second round campaign for the Presidency. The decision to appoint Griffith-Jones – a professor at the University of Sussex and collaborator with Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia University in New York – is proof that Boric build on not only ideas from the 2019 protest movement, but also experts close to Concertación and Nueva Mayoría, who led the centre-left governments of Chile’s slow transition from dictatorship.

It is also proof that, at the age of 35, Boric is aware of the importance of working with experienced economists such as Griffith Jones, Born in Prague in 1947, great-niece of Franz Kafka, and whose family emigrated to Chile the following year, we spoke about Boric’s dilemmas in needing to both respond to the demand for change in Chile, and to stabilise the economy.

It seems that Gabriel Boric is facing a problem. He is a candidate for change, a movement that has taken to the streets of Santiago to protest the neo-liberal model. But if he wins, he will come to power in a difficult budget situation that leaves little room for progressive budget policy…

Yes. At the moment the budgetary situation is very difficult. The fiscal deficit is already at 13% of GDP… Piñera went from one extreme to another in his response to the pandemic. He did nothing at first, and a lot of low-income people were in real trouble. This is where the first withdrawals from pension funds were introduced, to help low-income people in great difficulty. [Chile’s Congress authorised raids on the country’s privatised pension funds during covid, turning them into a “piggy-bank”, with about $50bn or 25% of their value withdrawn to date.] But then, in 2021, Piñera went to the other extreme. He gave generous support, perhaps too much, to many, even people who were not so poor. And consumption skyrocketed. Chilean GDP will grow this year between 11% and 12%. The economy is totally overheated.

What should be done?

Boric has committed himself to significantly reducing the budget deficit in one year and respecting the budget already approved by Parliament. It is a sign of his moderation. In the coming years, he wants to raise taxes gradually and increase the collection of existing taxes – higher direct taxes, and lower indirect taxes. Indirect taxes, such as value added tax, account for more than 50% of Chile’s total tax revenue, well above the OECD average. There is also a commitment to combat tax evasion, which in Chile is twice the OECD average, but this requires more tax inspectors.

The problem is more general. Latin America is experiencing a moment of polarization. It is necessary to break a model that was very unpopular, but the economic reality of countries like Brazil or Chile leaves very little space, and both Lula and Boric have moved closer to the centre.

Yes, at first many people thought that Boric would be too radical. But now perhaps the greatest fear is that he can not do enough.

Despite this, he is portrayed as radical in many media …

It’s true. The media talk about far right and far left. We must reject this false dichotomy, because Boric is a Social Democrat. [Right-wing candidate Jose Antonio] Kast is an extremist. In economics, he is quite radical; to reduce taxes when the deficit is 13% of GDP is downright daring. In politics, he is even more extreme. One of his deputies said that women should never have had the right to vote. Unbelievable. Kast proposed restricting the right to abortion, even for women who were raped, and forgiving Pinochet-era torturers.

But Boric is a European-style Social Democrat. I met him first at a conference to discuss the Scandinavian model of government. He has been more on the left, but he is aware of the current budget problems and is very open to discussions with all sides. That said, he is very committed to the need for redistribution.

Given the polarity and rejection of the system, do you think it can be a double-edged sword to enjoy the support of the main political figures from Concertación?

No. That’s very positive for Boric. Leftists will vote for him anyway. The problem is attracting the votes of most of those in the middle. Although the most important thing is to attract young people who demonstrate, but sometimes do not vote. Participation in the first round was very low. In the past, the center and the left always won when they merged. It can be expected to be the same this time. Boric acknowledged the contribution of the Christian Democrats (PDC) and it was a very good move. He met Ricardo Lagos [centre-left president from 2000 to 2006] and Michelle Bachelet [centre-left President from 2006 to 2010, and from 2014 to 2018]. They were wonderful to him. Much of the center and left have already joined the campaign. And the Christian Democrats support him even though they say they would not enter government with him. It is also true that the fact that Kast is percieved as disastrous made the reunion easier.

It is strange to compare the victory of the left in the Constituent Assembly with the results of November in the parliamentary elections. How did this happen?

Yes, 78% of voters voted [on 25 October 2020] in favor of a new constitution. Voting in the Constituent Assembly [over 15 and 16 May 2021] was a great victory for the left. But then, just a year after the referendum, the same voters voted for a parliament that was divided between left and right. There is therefore a lack of consistency. If Boric wins, he will have problems with Congress, which will likely try to block proposals such as the budget and tax reform.

Will there be more leeway afterwards?

I think so, after the first year. Boric and his supporters are very committed to the ecological transition. Chile is lucky because it has lithium, which is essential for batteries, and copper, which is essential for the energy transition. In addition, there is great potential for further development of solar and wind energy. It is necessary to give priority to certain sectors for that transition, supporting their development, and Kast does not understand this. Development banks must be mobilized for the green transition. And financial regulation can be used to incentivize commercial bank loans to companies with low-carbon investments.

Public investment is key. For example, Boric wants to invest heavily in building an extensive rail network. Then there is hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced sustainably in Chile because there are many ways to generate renewable energy. We can use green hydrogen in mining to have green copper.

Is there not a risk that the energy transition will create demand for metals and lead to more extraction and dependence on the export of raw materials?

The idea would be to move up the value chain. Manufacture batteries, incorporate more technology and knowledge. Scandinavian economies, which in the past were like Chile, dependent on exports of raw materials such as wood, managed to move up the value chain and develop rapidly. So it is necessary, for example, to produced more refined copper, to manufacture higher value-added cables.

Why would the left do it better than the right?

Because public investment and the development bank are essential for the green transition, and then catalyzing private investment in this sector is key. Kast doesn’t understand this. He caricatures the state as a dark and negative force, but those are the ideas of the past.

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Latest inflation figures from the Office for National Statistics put average price rises in the 12 months to September at 4.2%, its highest rate of growth since November 2011. Back then, a post-financial crisis surge in prices pushed inflation to above 5%, and it stayed high until mid-2014 when OPEC’s decision to maintain oil production helped bring down prices across the globe.

Whilst last year’s lockdowns and subsequent recessions kept inflation very low, as we would expect – with spending falling dramatically, there is little to no pressure to raise prices – reopening since earlier this year has coincided with a dramatic rise in prices. Despite some optimistic claims that this would be “transitory” shift in prices, dependent solely on the unusual demand conditions caused by reopening, nearly 12 months it is harder to sustain the view.

Some of this is due to Brexit, which even prior to Britain’s exit from the EU had pushed domestic inflation up as a result of the fall in the value of the pound, relative to other currencies, after the 2016 referendum. But most of it is from the bigger impact – global, even – of covid-19. Developed countries across the world are seeing similar combinations of supply chain stresses, shortages of key goods, rising energy prices, and higher inflation.

The big question in all this is whether these price rises will fade away as the initial shock of the pandemic wears off – perhaps stretching out into next year, but not much further – or whether they will become entrenched, moving us into a permanently higher inflation regime.

Incorrect models and tighter monetary policy

More conventional Keynesian economists would be far happier with a temporary surge in prices, since the usual belief is that price rises register an economy that is “overheating”: too much demand chasing too little supply and that (therefore) governments should either cut their own spending, raise taxes or, if they are unwilling or unable to do either of those two, to raise interest rates. So persistently high inflation tends to lead to demands for interest rate rises – which, of course, are now starting to happen. Central banks’ own mandates are typically, in this era of their “independence”, modelled on the “Taylor Rule” linking interest rates to inflation, with rates increases mandated as inflation also rises. The Bank of England avoided this temptation at last month’s rate-setting meeting of its Monetary Policy Committee, but the voices demanding a tightening of monetary policy are getting louder.

Latest in this growing chorus is the Financial Times’ widely-read chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, who sees today the first glimmerings of a return to the 1970s: “as price rises became more general and real wages were being eroded, workers became increasingly militant. Finally, a general wage-price spiral became all too visible.”

Under circumstances where strike numbers in Britain remain close to their lowest since records began, where union membership in the private sector is amongst the lowest in the developed world and – crucially – where average wage growth has been near-zero for a decade, a “general wage-price spiral” should be the last concern anyone has right now. Frankly, a little more “union militancy” would be good for the economy – pay rises would pull back on skyrocketing inequality, and put more money into the hands of people who are more likely to spend it.

But Wolf, instead, sees the problem of pay rises as being one in which inflation can move from being merely “transitory”, driven by exceptional post-lockdown circumstances, and moves into a permanent or at least long-run problem. He cites US economist Jason Furman as noting a tightening of labour markets, with “seven unemployed workers for every 10 openings”. Rattling around in people’s heads is the idea that, if pay rises are won by workers, these will turn into firms putting up prices, causing further demands for wage increases, and so forcing firms to raise prices again, and so on. This is the “wage-price spiral” Wolf refers to.

But the evidence from the last decade is that the British labour market, at least, has not been functioning like this. From mid-2014 onwards, as the OPEC “reverse oil price shock” worked its way through the global economy, inflation has consistently undershot both forecasts and the Bank of England’s own target – and this despite ultra-loose monetary policy of near-zero base rate and huge Quantitative Easing. Austerity, and the public sector wage freeze, certainly played its part, undermining the ability of those seeking work or in employment to bargain for higher pay. But so, too, does the “flexible” labour market, especially after 2010, with its mass creation of deeply insecure, low-paid work like the notorious zero hour contracts.

A model of the economy that didn’t include this extraordinary undermining of labour’s bargaining position – that instead assumed something closer to the labour market institutions of the 1970s were still in place – would be one that persistently overestimates inflation. This happened in the 2010s, and, to the extent that people think a wage-price spiral is a realistic possibility, and blame inflation on it, I think it’s happening again today. And to the extent that this leads to inappropriate calls for monetary policy tightening, it will cause problems today, too.

The real causes of persistent inflation

However, Wolf and others are right to worry about inflation becoming persistent, even if the mechanism they imply isn’t quite there. One part of this is the argument made by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan about demographics: that the exceptionally loose labour markets of the last forty years, the product of two enormous one-time expansions of the global labour force as China and Eastern Europe were integrated into it, are now tightening as this demographic exception approaches retirement. There is no second China out there. There will be no further loosening of labour markets in the future. And so wages, and – in their argument – prices and interest rates will finally start to rise.

It’s an interesting (and intuitive) argument that, incidentally, calls into question some cherished beliefs about the role of central bank “independence” in promoting low inflation over the last two decades or so. And for those with one eye on inequality, it holds out the possibility that the great shift in power towards capital and away from labour that characterised the neoliberal period may finally be coming to an end. This would, of course, over time move us back towards a kind of 1970s world, with higher inflation, higher interest rates – but also, potentially, stronger worker organisation able to win higher pay and better conditions, just like Wolf and others think already exists.

But the other part is significantly less positive. What Wolf calls “special factors”, citing the “surging price of gas” are likely to become less special over time. If there’s a disconnect between some conventional macro modelling and the reality of how labour markets have behaved in the last decade or more, there’s an even bigger disconnect between macro modelling and the reality of environmental decay. As a point of construction, conventional macroeconomic models tend to assume that, whatever is happening today, strong forces in the economy will pull it back to a stable growth path in the long run. But for this to happen, the conditions for growth to occur must themselves be stable. When all our environmental models are saying (for example) that extreme weather events, crop failures and disease outbreaks are all going to become more frequent, the assumption of environmental stability no longer applies.

So if (for another example) there is a frost in Brazil that has damaged coffee production, helping drive its price up to a seven year high today, that is a one-off shock that we would expect to fade away over time – prices would rise once, but the impact on inflation would disappear, since inflation measures price increases over time. But this seemingly one-off, specific environmental shock will be followed by other, similar shocks in the future, most likely at an increasing frequency: more droughts, more frosts, more wildfires and so on. The result will be a sustained increase in costs and prices: or, in other words, higher inflation.

It’s environmental breakdown that we should be worrying today’s inflation hawks, not the possibility of workers winning pay rises. And the prescription for dealing with this kind of ecological ratchet on prices is the exact opposite to the hawk’s usual package: not interest rate rises, but low rates to encourage investment and expand supply – particularly targeting ecological investment, as the People’s Bank of China is now doing. And not panic about rising wages but an insistence that the costs of ecological decline should be borne fairly, with pay increases across the board – paid for out of profits and interest as needed.

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Jan Toporowski

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Early reports suggest that the reopening of indoor hospitality in England has driven a hiring surge as employers try to meet the expected demand across the sector. Job search website Adzuna has reported a trebling in the advertised vacancies since March but the impact of unlocking – and a much-anticipated surge in consumer spending – has spread well beyond the most tightly-restricted sectors. The monthly survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development reports two-thirds of employers are looking to take on more staff, with just one in ten expecting to make redundancies. Over in the US, the combination of falling cases, a major improvement in vaccinations and the massive boost from the stimulus package – with more spending on the way – is having a similar effect, as employers report labour shortages across the economy.

All of this should be good news for those who work: other things being equal, tighter labour markets should mean better pay and conditions as employers seek to attract the workers they need. After a decade where incomes from labour have been severely depressed across the developed world – in the UK, average real wages and salaries are scarcely above their level a decade ago – this looks like a moment of hope for labour.

The “demographic reversal”

Intriguingly, it occurs at the point at which an interesting and important new book by two somewhat unorthodox economists, Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan, argues that the 40 year period we have just lived through has come to an end. The great expansion of the global labour market since the late 1970s – in both the opening of Eastern Europe and, spectacularly, the opening of China – they argue saw the balance of power shift decisively in favour of capital, with wages and salaries forced downwards by the new abundance of cheaper labour across the globe. They argue that demographic changes are ending the period of cheap and abundant labour, heralding a future of higher pay (and higher inflation) as the balance swings back. It’s interesting, even optimistic, but not completely convincing: demography alone is rarely destiny, and it underplays the dimension of control over labour that – as much as pay alone has always been crucial to the real functioning of labour markets under capitalism. It is not only that you want to pay a worker to perform a task: it is essential that the task is performed in the way that you, the employer, expect it to be performed. Mechanisms for controlling labour have ranged from the firm-level imposition of management commands, to the economy-level presence of unemployment as a disciplinary threat, to the direct management of people, as China’s hukou system creates, and as migration controls often try to impose.

Covid as a disruptive factor

The issue of control brings us back to covid – a profoundly disruptive factor in the organisation and management of the economy. Whilst a number of countries that suffered most in the first wave, Britain amongst them, now appear to bringing the virus under control, global cases reached their peak only at the end of April, driven by the devastating surge in India. But even some countries that seemed to get through the first 12 months of the pandemic in better shape are now reporting surges in cases, with both Singapore and Taiwan hastily expanding social distancing measures.

Covax, the initiative to supply vaccines to the world’s poorest, co-ordinated by the World Health Organisation, has never been ambitious enough, with only a fraction of available vaccine supply being provided by the richer countries. But even this initiative is now struggling to meet its own targets. Fewer vaccines means more infections, and more infections raises the possibility of new variants spreading – as we have seen in England with one of the SARS-Cov-2 mutations first seen in India being placed on Public Health England’s “variants of concern” list. There are rumours of a return to lockdowns in England, perhaps on a regional basis – with local leaders like Andy Burnham understandably furious at economic damage this will almost certainly cause in already hard-hit parts of the country.

We are a long way from being out of this crisis, and further economic disruption should be expected – certainly whilst the production and distribution of vaccines remains inadequate. But for as long as this involves a disruption to how and where work can be performed – which is, at its core, the source of social distancing’s deep economic impact – we are likely also to see a struggle over how that work is conducted. A recent survey by German thinktank the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation found a growing number of labour protests, including strikes, with health and safety concerns at their centre, shifting away from the more usual focus on pay. Control of work may well come to define the new frontier for tensions and conflict between capital and labour: one side introducing a raft of new surveillance technology, for example, the other insisting on greater control over time and protection at work.

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UK government figures out today show a 1.5% shrinking in the size of the economy in the first three months of the year – huge by pre-covid standards, but better than was widely expected, with rapid growth in March as schools reopened and some economic life resumed. That last month is likely to be a foretaste for the summer, as the lockdown and social distancing measures are eased through to June.

We know from last year that easing restrictions produces almost an automatic recovery in the economy, as people return to work, and start spending more money. Unlike last year, where a foolhardy government rush to normality helped produce a further surge in cases and subsequent, damaging lockdowns, the vaccine rollout this year has been a dramatic success. Hospitalisations and deaths from covid have fallen sharply, and the sense of uncertainty that hung in the air has reduced. Put all this together, and there is every reason to expect all the main economic indicators – from GDP to employment – to look rosy, right the way through to autumn.

But even this short-term recovery is likely to be highly uneven. The government and the Bank of England have put a great deal of faith in those who have saved money over the last 12 months. Supported by furlough or, more likely, working from home, many have been able to carry on earning during the pandemic, but have had fewer opportunities to spend on anything from restaurant meals to pints in the pub to holidays. As a result, some £160bn of exceptional savings – over and above what people normally save in a year – has built up, nearly all of it simply sitting in bank accounts, waiting to be used. The theory, pushed by the Bank of England, is that with confidence about the future returning, a great deal of this will be taken from those bank accounts and spent in a great rush of pent-up consumer demand. Deutsche Bank are even more optimistic, thinking 10% of the savings pot will be rapidly drawn over this year.

You can argue about the likely scale of this – and the Bank of England’s household survey in November said 70% of households intended to hold to their savings – but the rush to spend itself is likely to cause difficulties. With so much economic activity now shifting permanently online, a surge in consumer spending will not lead to a rapid revival in our high streets in the way it once did. This effect is likely to be reinforced by the shift to working from home, with the BBC reporting that almost all of Britain’s 50 biggest companies anticipate most staff returning to the office a few days a week. But with fewer office workers around, town and city centre shopping will take a hit, as Bloomberg’s new “Pret Index” demonstrates. This shows Pret sandwich sales as a share of January 2020’s figures and, as the table below shows, whilst more rural or suburban locations are almost back to pre-pandemic levels, city centre and transport hubs have been walloped.

This is an acceleration of a major, existing trend, rather than the pandemic introducing something wholly new. A market-led recovery, via consumer spending alone, is likely to leave many (already struggling) high streets. Government support is needed, not least in making sure the 250,000 retail workers that management consultants McKinsey expect to “transition” (nice euphemism) from the sector can find work. Beyond that, however, we need to reconsider what it is our high streets are for. At present we rely on the overspill from commercial activities – you and I going out to shop – to help support the public space they provide. If those commercial activities suffer, the public space suffers. It is time to consider more active government interventions: turning less busy streets into public parks, for example, or providing shared office space and community facilities in disused buildings.

Looking further ahead, we can perhaps already see some of the changes that covid-19 has wrought. With various restrictions on contact likely to remain in place for some time as the virus continues to circulate (and mutate) globally, service business in particular are likely to face significant new costs and uncertainties into the future. Manufacturing, however, is far easier to make covid secure: and, partly as a result, the recovery in manufacturing output and employment has been far more rapid here and (for example) in the US, with the UK Purchasing Managers Index of manufactured goods orders hitting a 27 year high in April. Politically, this is no bad thing for the government, which has set great store in its promises of new manufacturing jobs, particularly in the North and Midlands and particularly in low carbon technologies. But for an economy that remains so heavily skewed towards services, it points to a longer term drag on productivity and growth, once the initial sugar rush of ending lockdown has faded.

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Thomas Jefferson famously declared, ‘Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property’. He did so on the basis of their being natural public goods. Sadly, in 1994 under pressure from a group of US corporations, lead by the CEO of Pfizer, backed by the US administration passed TRIPS, the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property which effectively globalised the US intellectual property rights system.

In the past few months, a global campaign has grown in favour of suspending the IP protection for Covid vaccines during the pandemic. Over 100 countries have joined the campaign, with a prominent role played by India. At the beginning of May, the Biden Administration backed it, reversing the Trump administration’s opposition. Sadly, the British government has been one of the few rigidly opposing the idea of a waiver. Profits must not be jeopardised!

In The Conversation, Farasat Bokhari has made a valiant attempt to defend the IP system, claiming that patent protection ‘provides incentives via short-term monopoly profits so that firms and individuals can invest in innovation’, and warning that even a ‘on-off waiver’ would make firms far less likely to invest in any future emergency and that it would be a ‘dangerous precedent’. In voicing her opposition to the waiver proposal, Angela Merkel has also asserted that it would dampen ‘entrepreneurial innovation’.

The trouble is that this ignores the fact that the IP system enshrined in TRIPS does not foster innovation. It is a rigged system foisted on the world. As reported in my book, The Corruption of Capitalism, Pfizer’s CEO at the time, Edmund Pratt, openly boasted of that fact.

What TRIPS does is guarantee monopoly profits for a patent holder for 20 years, with the prospect for pharmaceutical firms of up to another 20 years, in a process called ‘evergreening’. During that time, no other firm can produce the patented item unless licensed to do so by the patent holder. That is hardly ‘short-term monopoly profits’.

Careful comparative studies have shown that strong IP protection through the patent system is not correlated with any increase in innovation. On the contrary, many patents are filed simply to stop anybody producing something that the patent holder wishes to prevent becoming a source of competition. And the evidence suggests that the IP system does not boost economic growth.

In the case of the Covid vaccines, it is well known that the corporations only started to invest in the R&D for a vaccine after the US, German and British governments had provided huge subsidies. The CEO of Pfizer was being economical with the truth when saying that its vaccine development was ‘entirely self-funded’. Actually, the vaccine was developed by its German research partner, BioNTech, which received 375 million Euros from the German government and a further 100 million Euros from the European Union. In addition, the US and other governments provided non-refundable advance order purchase agreements worth billions of dollars.[1]

All the corporations were given huge subsidies, and did not do the R&D until they had been given them. The companies did not take the risk, the taxpayers did, backed by NGOs, including the Gates Foundation. And public subsidisation has been the case for numerous patents, of which there are now over 15 million in force across the world.

In short, we should actively support the campaign for a waiver, precisely because it would be a prospective thin end of the wedge for dismantling the IP system that is rigged in favour of huge rentier incomes gained by monopolistic corporations in general. While some defenders of the system think that a waiver would be a ‘dangerous precedent’, we should look at it as a ‘liberating precedent’, opening up the prospect of eroding an unethical system. Probably, the waiver in itself would not have nearly as much positive effect as its leading advocates claim. But the symbolism would be substantial.

It is almost amusing that while Pfizer’s CEO was expressing public fury at Biden’s support for the waiver, warning of huge job losses and damage to the US economy and retribution to the Democrats, the CEO of Moderna admitted that he ‘didn’t lose a minute of sleep’ over the prospect of a waiver, pointing out that it would be costly and very difficult for other firms in other countries to produce vaccines.

The global patent system needs to be dismantled in its entirety. But this particular debate brings to mind a wonderful interview on American TV in 1955, in which the iconic interviewer, Ed Morrow, who had brought down Joseph McCarthy, asked Jonas Salk, who had just invented the polio vaccine, ‘Who owns the patent on this vaccine?’ ‘Well’, said Salk, puzzled, ‘the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’

In my book, I propose that as a first step, patents should be shortened to five years at most, and for much shorter where the research and risk have been publicly funded. Better would be to shift to a system in which substantial public prizes should be given to inventors and innovations of public goods, awarded by independent bodies. There is no nee for the existing monopolistic rent-seeking intellectual property rights system.

We should support the waiver campaign. But it does not help to exaggerate the potential positive effects. For instance, leading campaigners said on the BBC World Service that the EU leaders’ resistance to the waiver was the cause of the 4,000 deaths happening in India every day at the moment. That is deceiving exaggeration.

That horrendous death toll is a reflection of the long-term neglect of the Indian public health system (with total public health spending being 1.3% of GDP and with just over five hospital beds for every 10,000 people), coupled with incredible political complacency. Prime Minister Narendra Modi vaingloriously told the World Economic Forum on January 28 that India had beaten Covid-19, adding that it ‘has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.’ In reality, as in the UK, a long period of cuts to public health spending made the pandemic’s mortality much greater than it should have been.    

Guy Standing is a PEF councillor, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, and author of The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers thrive and Work does not pay (Biteback).       

[1] It is not as if Pfizer has an unblemished record of ‘entrepreneurial innovation’. It has been found guilty on numerous occasions of selling unsafe products, having to pay billions of dollars for malpractices. It has the dubious distinction of having had to pay the record corporate fine of $2.3 billion, for the illegal marketing of a painkiller. Other major vaccine producers also have records of serial misdoings. In 2010, AstraZeneca had to pay a federal fine of $520 million. Johnson & Johnson, new to vaccines with its Covid offer, has a criminal record as long as the proverbial criminal’s arm. One is surely entitled to ask why such companies should be regarded as safe holders of patents. [Full disclosure: The writer, by chance, has had the vaccine by the one major producer without a record of illegality, Moderna.]

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