Author: NLM Correspondent

Last year, remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) overtook foreign direct investment (FDI) as the largest source of incoming capital, having previously overtaken official development assistance (ODA) and private portfolio balance. This year, the World Bank, in its recent report, “COVID-19 Crisis Through a Migration Lens,” predicts that remittance flows will decline by 20 percent globally as the coronavirus renders swaths of people unemployed across the world. The report attributes this trend in part to the fact that immigrants are a demographic particularly vulnerable to unemployment during crises. Moreover, the authors say, travel restrictions and flight cancellations have…

By Thomas Vinod  The COVID-19 experience illustrates the failure of markets in preventing pandemics and the potential of public expenditures on a global scale to eventually spur a response. In a similar vein, the world’s top carbon emitters, China, the United States, India, Russia, and Japan—responsible for a combined 60 percent of global effluents —have done little to avert a climate catastrophe, and they must now lead a global fiscal stimulus to tackle the problem. A big difference from the COVID-19 experience: Climate spending is not just to put money in people’s pockets, but to promote low-carbon economic growth. The…

A key concern is that COVID-19 will turn the current democratic recession into a depression, with authoritarianism sweeping across the globe like a pandemic.  The coronavirus outbreak presents a range of new challenges to democracy and human rights. Repressive regimes have responded to the pandemic in ways that serve their political interests, often at the expense of public health and basic freedoms. Even open societies face pressure to accept restrictions that may outlive the crisis and have a lasting effect on liberty. The pandemic is unfolding at a time when democracy is in decline. According to data compiled by Freedom…

It is evident someone powerful is pulling the strings behind KRA’s unrelenting war on Keroche BY SGI ORIARO Charity is said to begin at home but for some of Kenya’s local industries – those not known to get along well with the state – this is a cruel fairy tale. No single story illustrates this better than the years-long tax wars between Keroche Breweries and Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA). The brewery’s proprietors Tabitha and Joseph Karanja are entrepreneurs who have painstakingly worked their way up the ladder. The Karanjas say they started a hardware shop in Naivasha back in the…

Border closings, confinement, and other social distancing measures to retard the spread of COVID-19 have brought the global economy to a near standstill. Forecasts of output losses and unemployment rates have increased as governments face a crisis that is like no others. The economies of developing countries have been hit as hard as, or even harder than, those of developed countries even though their lockdowns have not been as stringent. Developing economies are suffering the indirect effects of COVID-19 on external demand from China and advanced economies, resulting in a commodity price bust and reduced tourism, remittances, and capital inflows. In the…

By Katharina Fenz, Kristofer Hamel, and Baldwin Tong For nearly six months, journalists, pundits, and researchers have explored the ongoing and expected impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through several core lenses: public health, mortality, economic prospects, and, most recently, food security. These domains—which collectively constitute the first three Sustainable Development Goals—are the primary means by which the “temperature” of humanity can be quickly benchmarked. But as efforts to flatten the curve of infections now begin to take hold, policymakers would be well advised to start looking beyond the current crisis management phase to the medium term. With some 55 million more people now living…

The Constitution professionalizes and democratizes the budget-making process. On the one hand, it ensures Parliament benefits from the technical insights of the Commission while debating the revenue sharing and allocation Bills. On the other, it safeguards the legislative authority of Parliament by requiring that both Houses pay due regard to the recommendations without necessarily being bound. By David Wanjala The Supreme Court of Kenya, in an advisory opinion, has finally settled, among other vital issues, the controversy of whether recommendations by the Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA) are binding on both the National Assembly and Senate during deliberations on the…

Rules of unexplained assets do not simply evoke legal questions but moral ones too. By NLM Writer The Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act (ACECA) provides circumstances under which a person is required to explain how he or she acquired funds and other assets. This has commonly been referred to as unexplained wealth orders. The principle of unexplained assets is based on the aspect that a person who has assets that are not in any way comparable to his known legitimate source of income and the fact that he or she cannot not explain satisfactorily the source of the assets. With…

By Christabel Mideva Eboso In August 2010, Kenyans gave themselves what has come to be referred to as a transformative and progressive Constitution. This was the culmination of a long journey that started before the Kenyan state was born, through independence and through costly struggles to shape our society. The Constitution of Kenya 2010, summed up, was our shared, unique history as a society, and our shared aspirations for our nation. Our Constitution gave life to long known but ignored principles while introducing previously only aspired-to or thought-of values. There have been different arguments about what the framers and drafters…

The G-20 debt suspension initiative is unlikely to ease the significant credit challenges that the coronavirus pandemic has amplified in some frontier market sovereigns, particularly in Africa, Moody’s Investors Service reports. By lowering debt-service payments at a time when government resources are limited and access to market financing is considerably constrained, the initiative will help to ease short-term liquidity pressures. However, debt-service relief won’t have a significant impact on medium-term debt trends that have worsened during the crisis. Bilateral relief would only cover a fraction of the increased external funding gap resulting from the shock. “While debt-service relief will allow…