BY
RENFREY CLARKE
It is astonishing what the bourgeoisie will let slip when they're talking to one another and don't think we're listening! In light of federal trade minister Mark Vaile's ludicrous claims that the people who protested against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on November 13-15 were opposed to economic progress in the Third World, it's interesting to look back at the findings of a survey reported by the right-wing British Economist on May 12, 2001.
The survey, which examined per capita economic growth during the 1990s in 49 of the world's least developed countries (LDCs), revealed that the statistical relationship between obeying the WTO's free-trade dictates and achieving increases in living standards is precisely none.
Excluding Bangladesh, the biggest of the poorest, these countries saw growth of real GDP per head of just 0.4% a year in 1990-98. This was despite the fact that in this period many adopted relatively liberal and open economic policies, the Economist reported.
The LDCs have actually gone further than other developing countries in dismantling trade barriers. Of the 43 poorest countries studied, 37 per cent had no tariff barriers, or only minor ones, an openness matched by only 23 per cent of other developing countries.
Despite this, the Economist admitted, most of the poorest countries' economies have still fared badly, some of them even more than before liberalisation. Many depend heavily on a single export, such as coffee, where there have been precipitous declines in prices.
That growth figure of 0.4%, of course, does nothing to prove that there had been gains in the living standards of the bulk of the these countries' populations, since it's an average figure that conceals big increases in wealth for the elites.
Still, let's take that figure and consider its implications.
At an annual growth rate of 0.4%, the real per capita incomes of the world's poor will double in close to 200 years. So if the world's poor are unhappy with their average $2 a day, the apologists for the WTO like Vaile must be arguing that all they have to do is just wait 200 years. Then, instead of having $2 a day to live on, they can hope to have $4 a day.
Incidentally, have the champions of the WTO considered the implications for poor countries of abolishing import and export tariffs? These tariffs are among the few ways that governments in poor countries have of gathering revenues.
After all, you won't have much luck collecting income tax in countries where large sections of the economy function without money entirely, where a cash register is beyond the means of all but the wealthiest traders and where the rich are able to bribe their way around poorly paid tax collectors.
Without government revenues, there cannot be investment in health and education, which have been proven to have a strong positive impact on mass living standards.
But not to worry, poor governments can always borrow. In fact, they can borrow from the World Bank. Just as long as they agree that, as a condition of the loans, they'll implement structural adjustment programs. Under these programs, they must abolish any remaining controls on their trade and financial systems.
Good luck with that foreign debt!
From Green Left Weekly, December 4, 2002.
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