Most poor countries, however, have not enjoyed much benefit from globalization. Even among the so-called “poster children” of free trade, the “Asian Tigers” like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, improvement has not come by assiduously following the dictates of the Bretton Woods regimes — the IMF, World Bank, the WTO, etc . — but often by doing the opposite of what the institutions prescribe. For example, Asian countries that have had some brief successes in developing their own economies did not cut all their tariffs as demanded by globalizing institutions, or permit foreign entry without controls, or eliminate existing support for domestic businesses, local economies and local agriculture. Instead, those countries included “import substitution” — developing the ability to take care of their basic needs internally — rather than totally converting to an export-based production system. This latter process, heavily promoted by the IMF and the World Bank, has resulted in many nations shipping awamost of their food production while people at home go hungry or starve.
By at first resisting the economic model pushed by Bretton Woods, some countries managed to stay free of the volatility of export markets.But when they finally succumbed to heavy pressures from the IMF and the World Bank, they found their glory days quickly disappearing into the infamous Asian financial crisis (1997-1998), rooted directly in the new rules of free trade for finance and global corporations.
Most poor countries, however, have not enjoyed much benefit from globalization. After three decades of heavy IMF and World Bank medicines and less than a decade of WTO policies, they have understood that globalization is selling a false promise. The policies of the Bretton Woods institutions are not designed to benefit them, but to benefit rich industrial countries and their global corporations. For this reason, many of the poor nations of the world held firmly together in opposition to the WTO in Seattle, 1999.
The question is this: Do these globalizing institutions know what theyre doing? Or do they just blindly follow a failed ideological model? The worst case conclusion, which many now believe, is that the institutions surely do know what theyre doing and always have. They have an assignment: to remove all impediments to the free flow of global capital as it seeks to pry open the world’s last natural resource pools, markets, and cheap labor (and, to keep it cheap.)
To suggest they do all this to help the poor is high cynicism.
Jerry Mander and Debi Barker are co-directors of the International Forum on Globalization. David Korten is a former economist with U.S.A.I.D., author of When Corporations Rule the World, and an associate of the International Forum on Globalization.
I got this here
Will
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