This forum, featuring Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, Dr. Jose Antonio Ocampo, and Dr. Mark Weisbrot, was organized by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Multilateral economic institutions are facing a period of unprecedented challenges — among these are large macroeconomic imbalances (including the US current account deficit), stalled negotiations at the WTO, and a much-reduced IMF. Three economists discussed some of these current challenges and their implications for economic growth and development. The panel discussion was followed by a brief question and answer period.
In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system — like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases — are routinely ignored. We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.
In the Muslim world, on the other hand, the reputation of Shariah has undergone an extraordinary revival in recent years. A century ago, forward-looking Muslims thought of Shariah as outdated, in need of reform or maybe abandonment. Today, 66 percent of Egyptians, 60 percent of Pakistanis and 54 percent of Jordanians say that Shariah should be the only source of legislation in their countries. Islamist political parties, like those associated with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, make the adoption of Shariah the most prominent plank in their political platforms. And the message resonates. Wherever Islamists have been allowed to run for office in Arabic-speaking countries, they have tended to win almost as many seats as the governments have let them contest. The Islamist movement in its various incarnations — from moderate to radical — is easily the fastest growing and most vital in the Muslim world; the return to Shariah is its calling card.
How is it that what so many Westerners see as the most unappealing and premodern aspect of Islam is, to many Muslims, the vibrant, attractive core of a global movement of Islamic revival? The explanation surely must go beyond the oversimplified assumption that Muslims want to use Shariah to reverse feminism and control women — especially since large numbers of women support the Islamists in general and the ideal of Shariah in particular....
One reason for the divergence between Western and Muslim views of Shariah is that we are not all using the word to mean the same thing. Although it is commonplace to use the word “Shariah” and the phrase “Islamic law” interchangeably, this prosaic English translation does not capture the full set of associations that the term “Shariah” conjures for the believer. Shariah, properly understood, is not just a set of legal rules. To believing Muslims, it is something deeper and higher, infused with moral and metaphysical purpose. At its core, Shariah represents the idea that all human beings — and all human governments — are subject to justice under the law.
In fact, “Shariah” is not the word traditionally used in Arabic to refer to the processes of Islamic legal reasoning or the rulings produced through it: that word is fiqh, meaning something like Islamic jurisprudence. The word “Shariah” connotes a connection to the divine, a set of unchanging beliefs and principles that order life in accordance with God’s will. Westerners typically imagine that Shariah advocates simply want to use the Koran as their legal code. But the reality is much more complicated. Islamist politicians tend to be very vague about exactly what it would mean for Shariah to be the source for the law of the land — and with good reason, because just adopting such a principle would not determine how the legal system would actually operate.
Shariah is best understood as a kind of higher law, albeit one that includes some specific, worldly commands. All Muslims would agree, for example, that it prohibits lending money at interest — though not investments in which risks and returns are shared; and the ban on Muslims drinking alcohol is an example of an unequivocal ritual prohibition, even for liberal interpreters of the faith. Some rules associated with Shariah are undoubtedly old-fashioned and harsh. Men and women are treated unequally, for example, by making it hard for women to initiate divorce without forfeiting alimony. The prohibition on sodomy, though historically often unenforced, makes recognition of same-sex relationships difficult to contemplate. But Shariah also prohibits bribery or special favors in court. It demands equal treatment for rich and poor. It condemns the vigilante-style honor killings that still occur in some Middle Eastern countries. And it protects everyone’s property — including women’s — from being taken from them. Unlike in Iran, where wearing a head scarf is legally mandated and enforced by special religious police, the Islamist view in most other Muslim countries is that the head scarf is one way of implementing the religious duty to dress modestly — a desirable social norm, not an enforceable legal rule. And mandating capital punishment for apostasy is not on the agenda of most elected Islamists. For many Muslims today, living in corrupt autocracies, the call for Shariah is not a call for sexism, obscurantism or savage punishment but for an Islamic version of what the West considers its most prized principle of political justice: the rule of law...
So in contemporary Islamic politics, the call for Shariah does not only or primarily mean mandating the veiling of women or the use of corporal punishment — it has an essential constitutional dimension as well. But what is the particular appeal of placing Shariah above ordinary law?
The answer lies in a little-remarked feature of traditional Islamic government: that a state under Shariah was, for more than a thousand years, subject to a version of the rule of law. And as a rule-of-law government, the traditional Islamic state had an advantage that has been lost in the dictatorships and autocratic monarchies that have governed so much of the Muslim world for the last century. Islamic government was legitimate, in the dual sense that it generally respected the individual legal rights of its subjects and was seen by them as doing so. These individual legal rights, known as “the rights of humans” (in contrast to “the rights of God” to such things as ritual obedience), included basic entitlements to life, property and legal process — the protections from arbitrary government oppression sought by people all over the world for centuries.
Of course, merely declaring the ruler subject to the law was not enough on its own; the ruler actually had to follow the law. For that, he needed incentives. And as it happened, the system of government gave him a big one, in the form of a balance of power with the scholars. The ruler might be able to use pressure once in a while to get the results he wanted in particular cases. But because the scholars were in charge of the law, and he was not, the ruler could pervert the course of justice only at the high cost of being seen to violate God’s law — thereby undermining the very basis of his rule.
In practice, the scholars’ leverage to demand respect for the law came from the fact that the caliphate was not hereditary as of right. That afforded the scholars major influence at the transitional moments when a caliph was being chosen or challenged. On taking office, a new ruler — even one designated by his dead predecessor — had to fend off competing claimants. The first thing he would need was affirmation of the legitimacy of his assumption of power. The scholars were prepared to offer just that, in exchange for the ruler’s promise to follow the law.
Once in office, rulers faced the inevitable threat of invasion or a palace coup. The caliph would need the scholars to declare a religious obligation to protect the state in a defensive jihad. Having the scholars on his side in times of crisis was a tremendous asset for the ruler who could be said to follow the law. Even if the ruler was not law-abiding, the scholars still did not spontaneously declare a sitting caliph disqualified. This would have been foolish, especially in view of the fact that the scholars had no armies at their disposal and the sitting caliph did. But their silence could easily be interpreted as an invitation for a challenger to step forward and be validated.
Ronald McKinnon Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford and Senior Fellow of SIEPR and SCID, John B. Taylor, Professor of Economics at Stanford and Hiroshi Watanabe, Special Advisor to the Japan Center for International Finance spoke about What Will Happen to the Dollar? Managing International Exchange Rates at a SCID SIEPR breakfast on February 20.
At a lectern in a room of venture capitalists, Silicon Valley executives and professors at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research last week, Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary and now Harvard professor and hedge-fund adviser, was at his gloomiest.
In the audience, Myron Scholes -- Nobel laureate in finance, veteran of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge-fund debacle and now chairman of his own hedge fund -- was listening and scribbling on a yellow legal pad. His conclusion, one gaining momentum, is that the government eventually will spend a lot of taxpayer money to clean up the current credit mess and prevent economic catastrophe...
Wall Street would love what Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson derides as "a bailout," a way to unload its mistakes onto taxpayers. But unless the tide turns soon, the severity of the housing bust and fragility of the financial system may force even his hand.
There's all sorts of talk about ways for Washington to buy mortgages, essentially purchasing assets of the financial system. The Fed is trading some U.S. Treasurys for mortgage-backed securities to arrest the decline in prices that is pushing up mortgage-interest rates. Several leading Democrats are calling for a new government entity or an enlarged Federal Housing Administration to buy mortgages from lenders and investors, and to offer more-favorable terms to beleaguered homeowners.
Mr. Scholes takes a different tack, seeking ways to leave the assets (mainly mortgages) in the private sector, which he says can manage them better, and get capital flowing into the banking system so banks don't dump assets at distressed prices and worsen an already bad situation.
Mortgages and other bank assets aren't worth what banks thought. The losses erode the banks' capital cushion. Bank leverage, described in last week's Capital column, magnifies the effect.
In response, banks either (A) reduce lending and sell assets or (B) raise new capital on terms that dilute existing shareholders. Provided they can find investors willing to bet that bank assets eventually will be worth more than they are today, shareholders tend to prefer option A, the smaller bank. But that market solution could destroy value and produce a crippling credit crunch. Society prefers option B, hence exhortations from Messrs. Paulson and Summers for banks, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and others to raise capital.
Raising capital privately would be best, but what if that doesn't happen? What might government do? If a bank collapses, the government wipes out shareholders, owns everything and pumps in money. That's what the United Kingdom did with Northern Rock this year, and it's pretty much what the U.S. did with Continental Illinois in 1984.
Should the government (the U.S. government, that is, not foreign governments' sovereign wealth funds) put capital into banks?
"I think they should be considering it, at least thinking about it," Mr. Scholes said. "It seems to me that recapitalizing these entities would give us an opportunity to preserve the assets -- as opposed to dissipating their value through liquidation or foreclosure -- and provide a way for more capital to be infused into them without destroying value."
As John Lipsky, No. 2 official at the International Monetary Fund, argued in a speech yesterday: "Policy makers . . . need to 'think the unthinkable.'" He called for government "contingency plans" in case "investors aren't willing, as they have been up to now, to provide capital injections" to banks.
But there's a conundrum. If the government guarantees or buys debt from the bank, it makes the equity holders better off. If it buys equity and dilutes existing shareholders, it makes debt holders better off.
Mr. Scholes's solution: Let government invest both in debt senior to existing debt and in preferred stock senior to existing shares. Neither is advantaged versus the other. The bank doesn't dump assets and expands lending. If all goes well, the government gets out with a profit. One big caveat: This works only if assets truly are worth more tomorrow than they'll fetch today.
The practical wrinkles are many. ("I'm a theorist, not an institutionalist," Mr. Scholes quips.) He acknowledges the risk that some banks will take the taxpayers' money and bet it on risky assets to make a profit. He suggests auctioning off this government capital broadly to all banks, not just the sickest.
There are reasons to be skeptical. Banks do need new capital, said Hyun Song Shin, a Princeton finance professor. "It took the Japanese 10 years to learn this lesson." But he calls the Scholes notion "self-serving" for existing shareholders. They should be wiped out before the government puts capital in any bank, he argued. (What would he do? For starters, advise Mr. Paulson to summon the nation's top bankers to his office and strongly suggest they conserve capital by suspending dividends.)
With an already dim fiscal picture turning darker, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Thursday proposed a budget that would increase spending by 3.7 percent but cut money from every city department, from sanitation to schools.
The proposed $58.5 billion spending plan is a sharp departure from those of recent years, when unexpected surpluses fed by booms in the real estate and financial markets allowed the mayor to unveil ambitious new programs.
The mayor said the overall spending increase was driven by expenses he said were difficult to control, including Medicaid costs, health care and pensions for employees and debt service. To compensate for those costs and falling revenues, he said, the administration was trimming other spending by roughly 4.3 percent.
His plan calls for scaling back subsidies for public libraries, cultural programs, meals for the elderly, tutoring at the City University of New York and summer jobs for youth. The mayor could face a battle as the City Council focuses on those programs, many of which are dear to its members.
“We haven’t seen the effect of the cuts on the agencies,” said Councilman David I. Weprin, chairman of the Finance Committee. “We may be proposing alternative cuts, and we may be arguing for or against certain cuts.”
Mr. Bloomberg included a popular $400 property tax rebate for homeowners in his budget, but he warned that if the economy continued to sink or if the city did not receive enough state and federal aid, the final budget for the fiscal year beginning in July could include higher property taxes and more severe service cuts.
“If we try harder we can all find these kinds of savings without cutting back essential services or even most of the very desirable things that we do,” Mr. Bloomberg told commissioners and reporters at City Hall. “If we can’t get cooperation, if we can’t get help that we’re counting on, if we can’t get the things that we have been promised in the past,” he continued, taking aim at Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who is proposing a reduction in aid to the city, “then I don’t think that is possible.”
Should further cuts become necessary, Mr. Bloomberg said, he would fight hardest to retain the property tax rebate, saying that owners of one-, two- and three-family homes have not really benefited from the extraordinary surges in property values and have had to struggle to meet higher tax burdens.
Along with the proposed budget, Mr. Bloomberg presented a four-year financial plan that anticipates deficits of about $4.2 billion in the 2010 fiscal year, $5.6 billion in 2011 and $5.3 billion in 2012. Mr. Bloomberg’s charts — which featured more bad news than good, he noted with a wry smile — showed that in June the city anticipated that Wall Street would generate $16.8 billion in profits in 2007, but now expects just $2.8 billion.
Nonetheless, Mr. Bloomberg appeared unusually relaxed through the nearly 90-minute presentation, and sought to reassure New Yorkers that while difficult times were ahead, they were not yet dire. He said he thought the economy would continue to decline but had no way to truly know, and urged residents to enjoy themselves.
“If you live prudently and put some money away and work hard, you’re probably going to be O.K.,” he said at one point. “Don’t sit there and hunker down and, you know, try to live in a tent.”
Despite Mr. Bloomberg’s assurances, the proposed budget could lead to noticeable service reductions, especially at the Department of Education, which is set for a $324 million cut in the next fiscal year and is undergoing a $180 million reduction in the current fiscal year. Mr. Bloomberg, who won control of the school system in 2002, has staked much of his legacy on its improvement and has generally increased spending or allowed the department to avoid reductions, even in tight times.
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said that most of the reductions would be passed down to individual schools, with an average of more than $100,000 coming out of each school’s budget, although the final figures could vary widely depending on size and demographics.
Principals will, he said, “have to tighten some programs,” like eliminating intensive tutoring on Saturdays or after-school activities.
“My theory is that they should have some discretion. Different schools may find that they have to cut back on a program or that they may have to make some adjustment with the staff.”
While the central administration will make some trims, like reducing costs when purchasing supplies, the brunt of the cuts would fall on the schools. The department will save $1 million by reducing the number of citywide standardized tests to 8, instead of 10 as originally planned, and cut $10 million by eliminating some teaching positions for English as a second language instruction. Mr. Klein defended the decisions, saying that the Education Department had cut $230 million from the central administration office in recent years.
The city also transferred some spending responsibilities, including paying for computer repairs, to individual schools.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, criticized Mr. Klein, saying he did not do enough to protect the education budget and had misplaced priorities.
“Instead of looking at all the test-driven materials or looking at the bus contract or looking at other kinds of things where there is fat in the system, the first thing they do is make the schools pay for it,” she said. “The chancellor should be the champion of the schools, not cut into the schools.”
Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal, which seeks to reduce overtime costs at a number of agencies, would also cut funds for 1,000 police officer positions that were authorized in richer times, officials said. The move is not likely to have much practical effect on the size of the force since the headcount at the department, which has been facing a recruiting crisis because of low starting salaries, has remained well below the maximum allowed.
The mayor and his aides portrayed many of the trims as savings realized from greater efficiency or shifting realities, like closing shelters because of a decline in the population of single homeless adults. Pressed on the cuts to the sanitation budget, for example, aides said that garbage truck routes would be consolidated and could not guarantee that residents would see as many pickups.
The research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, Charles Brecher, said he suspects Mr. Bloomberg will use the prospect of a property tax increase to pressure lawmakers to restore the expected money.
It's "a long-standing strategy that between January and April, a mayor tries to set up the terrible things that will happen in the financial plan if the Legislature doesn't provide some amount of aid," Mr. Brecher said. "His threat is that he's not going to cut things, but that he is going to have to re-impose this tax."...
When testifying on the governor's budget today before the Assembly Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Bloomberg also is expected to focus on Mr. Spitzer's proposal to collect more than $1.1 billion through a series of fees and tax changes, which business leaders have warned could threaten the economy and dissuade businesses from locating in New York....
He has argued in the past that the city carries the state economy on its shoulders and should therefore receive more money from the state. Last week, he revisited this theme yet again, including a chart in his financial plan summary illustrating that the city pays $11.1 billion more in state taxes than it receives in funding.
"New York City needs to be treated fairly by New York State. We need to get back our fair share of New York State tax revenues," the financial plan summary states. "Our budget and financial plan includes the funding commitments that New York State made to the City last year, including the commitments to education capital and revenue sharing."
In a study published in the journal Epidemiology, the team compared the dietary habits of 465 people with chronic kidney disease and 467 healthy people. After controlling for various factors, the team found that drinking two or more colas a day — whether artificially sweetened or regular — was linked to a twofold risk of chronic kidney disease.
But drinking two or more noncola carbonated drinks a day, they found, did not increase the risk.
The authors of the study say more research is needed, but their findings support the long-held notion that something about cola — the phosphoric acid, for example, or the ability of cola to pull calcium from bones — seems to increase the risk of kidney stones, renal failure and other conditions affecting the kidneys.
Hand grip strength does not only provide reliable information about the health of a person. It also reveals the socio-economic status, future disability and mortality risks. It therefore permits a glance into the individual�s future. Karsten Hank and Hendrik J�rges, MEA, in cooperation with Jergen Schupp and Gert G. Wagner, DIW Berlin, merged datasets of SHARE and SOEP and analysed the grip strength of the Germans. The result: from 16 to 50 years of age, Germans squeeze so hard that exact statements about their health cannot (yet) be made. However, beyond 50 years, the decreasing muscular strength does speak volumes
An interview I gave to a Sri Lankan paper, where I pointed to the lack of an evidence-based policy debate on economic issues in Sri Lanka, seemed to have struck a chord. An economist friend wrote, "When we speak out we are labeled as ‘terrorists.’" The head of a Colombo-based think-tank, the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), wrote "Your comments on the lack of an evidence-based economic debate in Sri Lanka is hitting our email networks and websites, and is something we’ve been discussing for sometime within CEPA, in the wider context of development and poverty eradication.
Sri Lanka needs debate on economic policy centered on real evidence or research instead of extreme posturing based on ideology if the island is to progress, a top development economist said.
"Sri Lanka is already a middle income country with about 1300 US dollars of per capita income," Shanta Devarajan, chief economist for South Asia at the World Bank, told LBO in an interview on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the Bank and the International Monetary Fund here.
"But if you compare it with other countries at the same level, the economic policy debate is much more evidence-based elsewhere. In India, which is about 1000 dollars per capita, I find that the nature of economic policy debate is evidence based.
"Right now in India there is a vigorous debate about opening the capital account. People are writing papers and analyzing and participating in that debate. In Sri Lanka it is usually an ideological debate."
Devarajan points to a recent 500 million US dollar sovereign bond as a case in point where the government depicted the bond as a "great thing" while the opposition claimed it was "horrible."
"The truth of the matter is that they are both wrong," says Devarajan. "Ideally they should cut the budget deficit, but politically it is difficult to do. There are also constraints such as defence and interest costs, which may be difficult to avoid."
Globalisation - in particular the rise of China and India - is driving a lot of these changes. The world oil price has risen by 80 per cent over the past 12 months and - since 2001 - China alone has accounted for about 40 per cent of the increase in oil demand. Global food prices have gone up by about 50 per cent this year. There are short-term reasons for this, such as a drought in Australia and pig disease in China. But the biggest long-term driver of increased prices is growing wealth in China and India.
Political instability over higher food prices is a key concern. Last year saw tortilla demonstrations in Mexico, pasta protests in Italy, and unrest in Pakistan over bread prices. Soybean prices, meanwhile, prompted demonstrations in front of Indonesia's presidential palace. Food inflation in China is a major problem.
But the connection between the expansion of biofuels and higher global food prices is not clear cut, with the biofuels industry saying its impact is relatively small and biofuel critics saying that ethanol plants are driving up the price of corn and biodiesel producers are taking a bite out of the soybean crop.
"The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before," says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), an environmental think tank in Washington. World population growth will require food for an additional 70 million people this year, the EPI said in a report last week.
FOR as long as most people can remember, food has been getting cheaper and farming has been in decline. In 1974-2005 food prices on world markets fell by three-quarters in real terms. Food today is so cheap that the West is battling gluttony even as it scrapes piles of half-eaten leftovers into the bin.
That is why this year's price rise has been so extraordinary. Since the spring, wheat prices have doubled and almost every crop under the sun—maize, milk, oilseeds, you name it—is at or near a peak in nominal terms. The Economist's food-price index is higher today than at any time since it was created in 1845 (see chart). Even in real terms, prices have jumped by 75% since 2005. No doubt farmers will meet higher prices with investment and more production, but dearer food is likely to persist for years (see article). That is because “agflation” is underpinned by long-running changes in diet that accompany the growing wealth of emerging economies—the Chinese consumer who ate 20kg (44lb) of meat in 1985 will scoff over 50kg of the stuff this year. That in turn pushes up demand for grain: it takes 8kg of grain to produce one of beef.
When monetary expansion is ineffective, fiscal expansion...must take its place. Such a fiscal expansion can break the vicious circle of low spending and low incomes, "priming the pump" and getting the economy moving again. But remember this is no by any means an all-purpose policy recommendation; it is essentially a strategy of desperation, a dangerous drug to be prescribed only when the usual over-the-counter remedy of monetary policy has failed.
Economic policy’ has been a key topic of debate among economists, social scientists, policy makers, administrators, investors, donors and others interested in growth and development. Over the past two decades, it has become highly controversial and provocative due to the involvement of donor agencies in economic policy issues of developing economies. A detailed analysis of the small open economy of Sri Lanka presents an interesting case study as its policy experience covers both controlled and open economy policy regimes over a period of five decades. Here are 23 well-trained economists and social scientists who have put together an in-depth and timely analysis about the change of policy regimes and its impact on socio-economic development of Sri Lanka. It’s a compendium of articles in honor of Gamini Corea in recognition of his contribution to Sri Lankan economic policy making and international policy making.
The volume is edited by Saman Kelegama, Executive Director of the Institute of Policy Studies and Co-Editor of South Asia Economic Journal, best known for his contribution on policy analysis in Sri Lanka. An innovative aspect of this volume is that it consists of six distinct sections: i) development strategy and ideology, ii) macroeconomic policy, iii) agriculture, industry and technology development, iv) employment and labour, v) institutional and governance issues, and vi) social welfare. The editorintroduction to the volume with a summary of the milestones of Gamini Corea’s career and to each of the parts and chapters put the individual studies into context to provide a comprehensive account of theory, issues and policy.
As far as we are aware, there exists at least five major compendiums of studies dealing with evolution of post-independence economic policy of Sri Lanka. This volume however, is a welcome contribution as it presents a more careful and detailed analysis of economic policy in Sri Lanka using a structured format. Its time coverage and scope are much more encompassing than any other study presently available. The volume contains quite thorough and detailed analysis of policy issues which are of vital importance to the on going policy debate in Sri Lanka.
Chapters covered in Part I deal with growth of manufactured exports and terms of trade, the influence of development ideology in macroeconomic policy reform process, the lessons of national planning, understanding policy reforms (1960-2000) and the importance of the public sector and includes Chapters 1-5. Part II deals with aspects related to fiscal policy, public debt, and exchange rate while Part III encompasses Chapters 9 to 11 focusing on agricultural development, industrial policy, and technology development. Part IV is concerned with employment and labour paying special attention to labour productivity, youth unemployment and migration. Part V examines issues related to economic liberalization and institutional reform, competition policy, privatization and regulation, and banking sector reforms. Part VI consists of four studies on colonial lineages of the welfare state, overview of the health sector, public investment in education, and poverty alleviation.
"A report issued by Common Cause and the Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund found that the tobacco industry made almost $3 million in Political Action Committee contributions to federal candidates during the 2005-2006 election cycle, including more than $1.7 million in contributions directly to federal candidates," it adds.
"The Institute on Money in State Politics found that tobacco companies and retailers gave over $96 million to state-level candidates, committees and ballot measure campaigns during the 2005 and 2006 election cycle."
In 1998, states reached a settlement with tobacco companies in which they received $246 billion over 25 years to pay for the costs of smoking-related illnesses.
