Andres Velasco writes:  Latin America has a new export: populist backlash. It first landed on the warm and receptive shores of the Mediterranean, nurturing support for Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos. Now it has reached the United Kingdom.

Corbynismo, the ideology of the long-marginalized British MP Jeremy Corbyn – who admired Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chávez, thinks Vladimir Putin was justified in invading Ukraine, and now heads Britain’s venerable Labour Party – sounds familiar to anyone acquainted with Latin America.

Of course, this new populism (Hillary Clinton’s Democratic rival Bernie Sanders is also a card-carrying member) has much fodder. But being mad is not the same as being right. The new European populists are parlaying legitimate frustration into a misguided set of policies that can only produce more of the same. Latin Americans learned this the hard way in decades past. Europeans (and perhaps Americans) may be about to as well.

Three conceptual confusions cause Corbynismo to get crucial matters completely wrong.

The market for potatoes is not like the market for loans. Yes, bankers are greedy. And, yes, financial markets require close supervision and regulation. But what is true of financial markets need not be true of other markets.

Financial markets are not disciplined by the threat of bankruptcy. When banks get into trouble, governments always save them or wish they had (think Lehman Brothers). Regulation needs to provide the discipline that markets cannot.

But followers of Corbynismo are wrong to infer that the ills of financial markets infect all other markets, all the time. Countries, whether rich or poor, do not need a Potato Supervisory Board with new and enhanced regulatory powers.

It is great to be Keynesian – but during both halves of the cycle. Yes, orthodox economists of (mostly) Teutonic origin peddle a lethal fiscal-policy prescription. When the economy is booming, they claim, expenditure must be cut.. When the economy is tanking, expenditure also has to be cut in order to restore confidence and revive investment. For some European economies, this prescription has caused a needlessly long recession.

The way to render an aggressively counter-cyclical fiscal policy feasible is by relying on modern budget rules.

We did this in Chile during the copper price boom of 2006-2008, running budget surpluses of up to eight percentage points of GDP. When Wall Street melted down, we had the fiscal room to apply one of the most aggressive anti-crisis plans anywhere.

There is nothing inevitable or God-given about suffering, injustice, and inequality. That is why modern social democrats and progressive liberals are eager to right social wrongs. But effectiveness requires agnosticism about the policies required to achieve lofty ends.

Consider health care. Different things work differently in different places. Britain has a single payer and a single service provider: the National Health Service. Canada has a single public payer but mostly private providers. Obamacare establishes a public mandate to buy private insurance (with public subsidies for the poor) to finance services provided by (mostly) private hospitals and clinics.

Rarely is a US CEO held accountable for the activities of the company he leads. Donald Leon Blankenship, former CEO of the now defunct Massy Energy Company is on trial for the death of 29 miners in the explosion at the company’s Upper Big Branch deep mine in Montcoal, West Virginia on April 5, 2010. Three invstigators have concluded that his methods contributed to the  explosion . This is the first time in 150 years of Appalachian mining that a top boss of a coal firm has ever had to answer for how he ran his company.

Responding to the Syrian refugee crisis worldwide.  Abe of Japan writes a check.

Nancy Snow writes: Last year, 5,000 people applied for refugee status in Japan. 11 were accepted.

Japan is a strong target for refugee criticism because of its modest engagement in social media and global communications. Typically, it doesn’t proactively make its case to the world, largely allowing the international press and the Twitterverse to frame its issues for it.

The Washington Post article, comparing the refugee response of Europe with Japan’s closed doors, quotes heavily from Twitter messages that argue for opening the doors to refugees in Japan.

Accepting refugees to Japan is not unprecedented, just very limited. Between 1978 and 2005, Japan accepted over 11,000 Indo-Chinese refugees fleeing the Vietnam conflict. Japan was the first Asian country in 2010 to participate in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ resettlement program, a pilot program to bring 90 Myanmar refugees from Thailand over the course of three years.

Where Japan shines is in providing assistance as a leading humanitarian nation. It is a top official development assistance (ODA) country, just below the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. International aid ostensibly greatly improves the lives of refugees. But because Japan is not a top host nation for refugees, it is vulnerable to critical global media stories singling it out as a rich country that takes in the least refugees. In contrast, Germany is celebrated for opening arms wide to take in up to half a million refugees. Germany may be facing incredible burdens from this population infusion, but its liberal refugee policy blowback may take years.

Germany was the Cinderella of the refugee crisis and Japan the Evil Stepmother before Abe’s address to the United Nations on Sept. 29. Abe announced a tripling of the budget from last year to $810 million in assistance to refugees and internally displaced people in Syria and Iraq.

The refugee criticism of Japan risked threatening an image that Japanese leaders have attempted to cultivate in developing nation brand Japan as a compassionate leader in the world. One of Japan’s most honored citizens, Madame Sadako Ogata, high commissioner of the U.N.’s refugee agency for a decade (1991-2000), remains one of the country’s most honored citizens. At age 88, she remains president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency, a Tokyo-based developmental organization that works to alleviate poverty, as one mission.

The focus on Syria may also carry with it a bitter memory for many Japanese. This past January, Abe announced a $100 million donation to help the countries of the Middle East fighting Islamic State inside their borders. Within a few days, Muslim militants with IS beheaded Kenji Goto, a journalist, and Haruna Yukawa, the Japanese hostage that Goto had gone to Syria to attempt to rescue.

Abe’s tripling of humanitarian assistance for refugees and internally displaced people in the Middle East is notable.

Gun deaths go down when gun control laws are stricter.

Global growth will be likely weaker this year than last with only a modest acceleration expected in 2016, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde said on Wednesday, and reiterated that India remains a bright spot.

“The good news is that we are seeing a modest pickup in advanced economies. The moderate recovery is strengthening in the euro area, Japan is returning to positive growth, and activity remains robust in the US and the UK as well. The not-so-good news is that emerging economies are likely to see their fifth consecutive year of declining rates of growth,” Lagarde said in a speech ahead of October 9-11 IMF-World Bank annual meetings. “India remains a bright spot. China is slowing down as it rebalances away from export-led growth. Countries such as Russia and Brazil are facing serious economic difficulties. Growth in Latin American countries, in general, continues to slow sharply. We are also seeing weaker activity in low-income countries – which will be increasingly affected by the worsening external environment,” she said.

The IMF will release its World Economic Outlook next week. She said policy makers will need to strengthen policies to address current challenges and help lead the world economy to recovery.  “I am calling on policy makers to make a policy upgrade to address the current challenges,” Lagarde said, adding that the world is at a “difficult and complex juncture”. The prospect of rising US interest rates, China’s slowdown, a sharp deceleration in the growth of global trade, and the rapid drop in commodity prices are contributing to global uncertainty, she noted. With conflict and forced migration, Lagarde said there is the “human toll” from economic dislocation and low activity. More than 200 million people remain unemployed worldwide, income inequality is rising, and women continue to be disadvantaged both in pay and labour market opportunities.

Kristoff Saunders write:  While some emerging markets are facing sharp declines in growth and investment, Turkey is holding out, experts said, remaining both a growing economy, and a significant presence in global politics

“The Turkish economy should see growth in the third quarter, and will substantially recover in the fourth quarter,” forecast Bora Tamer Yilmaz, an economist with Ziraat Securities. Growth is forecast at 3 percent for the quarter by a number of economists.

The recovery in Europe will contribute significantly to Turkish growth this year, Standard & Poors said in a report published on Oct. 1.

Some emerging markets are facing “their fifth consecutive year of declining rates of growth”, warned Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund in a speech on Thursday.

“This outlook is heavily affected by major economic transitions — namely, China’s transition to a new growth model and the normalization of U.S. monetary policy — that are creating global ripple effects or spillovers and spillbacks,” Lagarde said.

The Institute for International Finance has said that, for the first time in nearly 30 years, more money is leaving emerging markets than entering them. The institute projected net outflows of $541 billion in 2015, according to a note published on Oct. 1 on its website.

Brazil and Russia are especially affected, and, indeed, are already in recession.  Malaysia is experiencing slow growth, forecast to hit only 4.5 percent in 2015, according to the Malaysian Finance Ministry. Growth in China is below 7 percent this year.

But the Turkish economy grew 3.8 percent in the second quarter, according to Finance Ministry statistics. Industrial production was up 0.3 percent in July, TurkStat said, and domestic demand was up 0.4 percent in the same month.

Lagarde pointed out in her speech that financial risk is high for many emerging markets, due to high levels of debt.

But Turkey is less exposed to this kind of risk, Paul Gamble, senior analyst at Fitch Ratings told Anadolu Agency.

“Another reason that we affirmed the rating, there has been no issue with the banks or corporates’ ability to roll over maturing debts. They still have comfortable access to capital markets. In fact, even if there is an abrupt change in the capital markets’ financing conditions, Turkish corporates and banks have comfortable foreign exchange positions,” he said.

Moreover, with foreign direct investment still substantial, at $9.71 billion from January to July, according to the central bank, Turkey is holding out well despite the difficult global climate for investment.

“We expect the economy to improve and grow moderately this year, and more rapidly in 2016,” Yilmaz said.

What’s more, Turkey’s influence in geopolitics is still significant, despite political uncertainty, experts said.

Turkey is expected, for example, to play a major role in the settlement of the conflict in Syria, according to Sinan Ulgen, executive chairman of the Istanbul based EDAM think tank, and managing partner of the consultancy Istanbul Economics.