[PEN-L:12739] Fwd: [change-imf] Jubilee for the IMF?
From: "Sara Grusky" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: Bread for the World To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 14:39:59 -0500 Priority: normal X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12a) Mailing-List: list [EMAIL PROTECTED]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]mailto:change-imf-unsubscribe@ ONElist.com Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [change-imf] Jubilee for the IMF? From: "Sara Grusky" FINANCING MULTILATERAL DEBT RELIEF: JUBILEE FOR THE IMF OR VICTORY FOR THE POOR? By Sara Grusky, Debt and Development Project, Bread for the World Institute (the viewpoint expressed in the article is my own and does not represent the views of Bread for the World) Last Friday afternoon, Stanley Fischer, Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, invited a few representatives of Washington-based NGOs to a meeting in his office to discuss financing debt relief. Most Washington-based NGOs working on issues of developing country debt and reform of the international financial institutions (IFIs) have not often had the experience of being courted by the institutions at such high levels. Why was Mr. Fischer so eager to meet with these NGOs? The IMF is in a pickle. Controversy surrounding the Funds activities in Asia, Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil, not to mention criticism of the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) now to be called the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) have made it very difficult for the Fund to garner Congressional support for new resources. The international Jubilee movement demanding cancellation for developing country debts by the year 2000 has provided the Fund with a convenient new pretext in its search for resources. But, how has a movement demanding economic justice for the poor in developing countries been twisted to provide a rationale for new resources for the IMF? When some of the Jubilee movement let the external debt problem be defined as a financing issue (i.e. the need for new financing so G-7 governments and the IFIs can cover for the bad loans they made) without addressing the deeper structural issues that have led to the debt problem in the first place (unfair trade practices, trade and capital liberalization, macro and structural reforms imposed by the IFIs, corrupt government elites in poor countries, among many others) the vision and potential of the Jubilee movement was compromised. Most dangerous of all, when the Jubilee cry for economic justice is reduced to a cry for new financing from the G-7, its vision becomes ripe for co-optation by the international financial institutions who are always alert for a new rationale for replenishment before a reluctant U.S. Congress. Unfortunately, this is precisely the trap into which some parts of the Jubilee movement have fallen. The IMF claims it needs new sources of finance to provide debt relief. You might ask why the IMF or other international financial institutions cannot just write-off bad loans like commercial banks often do? The Fund claims its bylaws will not permit this. The IFIs are lenders of last resort and the stability of the international financial system, so they argue, requires that their capital base be preserved. Some elements of the Jubilee movement have accepted this argument. This means that debt relief requires new financing for the international financial institutions the very institutions that have imposed harsh structural adjustment policies as the quid pro quo for both new loans and debt relief. The U.S. Treasury plans to propose an amendment to H.R. 1095, legislation for debt relief, that would enable the IMF to use proceeds from the sale of gold to finance debt relief, structural adjustment loans, and other institutional needs. The IMF has been attempting, since 1993, to sell gold to finance the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF). Opposition from some G-7 countries faded away with changes in European governments. However, there is still serious concern about potential Congressional opposition to gold sales, even cloaked in the cause of debt relief. Thus, we have Stanley Fischer summoning U.S. NGOs to a meeting. What did Mr. Fischer have to say? First, he made it clear that the Fund wants to do what it can to finance the Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC), but this would not be possible without gold sales. Second, he wanted to reassure the NGOs that the IMF and the World Bank were planning to cooperate fully in the implementation of the new poverty reduction strategy, i.e. they would coordinate on macroeconomic and structural reforms, as well as the poverty reduction framework. (This is not highly reassuring in the context of a recent World Bank report that reveals substantial neglect of social and environmental aspects in their recent
[PEN-L:12742] US Economic History Texts
Can someone please recommend progressive texts for a lower division college course in US Economic History. Not only are the standard texts getting worse (more conservative), but their cost is approaching the annual income of a Full Professor here at Buffalo State. Please respond off-list to me ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Thanks begin:vcard n:Koritz;Douglas x-mozilla-html:FALSE org:Buffalo State College adr:;;1300 Elmwood Avenue;Buffalo;New York;14222-1095;USA version:2.1 email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Chair, Department of Economics Finance tel;fax:(716) 878-4009 tel;work:(716) 878-6640 note:Resurgent City Center for Cooperative Community Development x-mozilla-cpt:;0 fn:Douglas Koritz end:vcard
[PEN-L:12745] Re: US Economic History Texts
Douglas. This should be conducted on the list. I think that many of us would be interested. You can try using Who Built America, at least as a supplement. By the way, the address card at the end of your message is a nuisance. Douglas Koritz wrote: Can someone please recommend progressive texts for a lower division college course in US Economic History. Not only are the standard texts getting worse (more conservative), but their cost is approaching the annual income of a Full Professor here at Buffalo State. Please respond off-list to me ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Thanks -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:12743] trade theory distribution
Rob writes:Do you lot remember Stolper and Samuelson's 'Protection and Real Wages' (1941), or have you heard of Ronald Rogowski's *Commerce and Coalitions* (Princeton, 1989)? All about how protection favouring those who are, control or use 'factors' in which the domestic economy is poorly endowed and disfavouring those who are, control or use the relatively locally abundant. The upshot being that if an economy is low on capital but has labour to spare, protection favours capital and hurts labour. 'Liberalisation' would suit labour in such economies. If, like seems currently to pertain in the US, you have loads of capital but begin to run short on labour, protection favours labour and hurts capital. Pat Buchanan would suit labour and hurt capital in such a society. In which case we have a VERY significant bout of populist, xenophobic, trade-warring Perotism in front of us, courtesy of a substantial slice of the great American working class. I don't think these models make much sense partly because they're totally static, among other things taking the quantity of capital goods and the production functions as fixed and unchanging. (BTW, this assumes a naive -- i.e., neoclassical -- vision of technology, along with a utopian -- i.e. Walrasian -- vision of market processes.) As has been known since at least Alexander Hamilton, a country can invest to change the amount of capital goods it has (not to mention the mix of industries, something SS miss). Pen-l's famous Brad deLong (a former Undersecretary of the US Treasury) co-authored an article arguing that countries can gain a lot in terms of labor productivity growth from investment in equipment, as might be suggested by vintage models. One of the advantages that the US has is that it produces capital goods, so that by and large the supply of capital goods isn't imported, so that the demand for capital goods is indirectly a demand for labor-power. (This is changing, of course, despite those who pooh-pooh globalization.) With or without with imported capital goods, capital goods are only scarce in the short-run. (In Keynesian terms, the return on ownership of capital goods represents quasi-rents, i.e., temporary rents that always are threatening to go away due to new investment.) Also, those models assume away international mobility of fixed capital (and totally ignore financial issues). I really think that issues of free vs. restricted trade distract us from a more fundamental issue of capital mobility. (Of course, these issues can't be separated: dropping trade restrictions between the US and Mexico mean that US-based capital can more profitably move to Mexico and then export the goods back to the US.) Labor doesn't like globalization because capital -- especially financial capital -- is more mobile than labor. Capital mobility puts labor in different countries in competition, encouraging the downward harmonization of wages relative to labor productivity, which means the downward harmonization of wages alone (the race to the bottom) if capital can take the highest-productivity "modern" equipment to low-wage areas. (This depresses world consumer demand relative to production, but that's another story.) And capital mobility to new areas disrupts traditional ways of life, bringing in all sorts of pollution (as Summers recommends), and makes these countries satrapies of international capital. They find they can only prosper if there aren't other countries that offer tamer workforces with lower wages (combined with infrastructure, etc.) Even then they're punished if the finance boys girls panic and decide to short the currency. So from your multiple-choice test, I would choose: (a) Samuelson thought of it, and he was an over-rated, boojie, anti-institutionalist, marginalist bastard, who makes no allowance for the solidarity of which the workers are capable; I don't know if his anti-institutionalism is relevant, but his Walrasian model seems a perfect example of the bourgeois vision of society (ahistorical, static, and unsocial). He seems less of a "bastard" than the folks that run the IMF. (Some of my best friends are bastards. We need a better term.) (b) capital is too mobile these days to think in such national-economy-bounded terms; Nation-states are still pretty important, because they have states that collect taxes and maintain order, that pay debts and provide the TNCs with infrastructure, tame educated labor-forces, tax breaks, etc. If there's enough a popular insurgency, they might do something good for a change. (c) 'information' is not at all affording the US global monopoly market power in the key growth province of 'the new economy', and its placelessness renders all such thinking obsolete Info does seem to be the US forte. But with a falling exchange rate, mebbe we can sell some goods to the rest of the world some time soon. (Of course that broadcasts recession to
[PEN-L:12741] Re: Julius Nyerere dies
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] ...An uncharacteristically humble and modest national leader This rings absolutely true. My only contact was at a conference commemorating his 75th birthday in 1997. After he had the first comment on a paper on post-apartheid S.African subimperialism (in a huge auditorium whose electricity supply, including microphone, had just cut out), about a dozen other people (including undergrads) were allowed to ask questions before the chair recognised a patient Mwalimu (whose hand had been up steadily) for his second comment. Nowhere else in Africa would that happen. And he was, at the end, apparently making serious gestures of reconcilation to the scattered and battered Tanzanian left, which he had played the key role in repressing during the 1970s. There was talk of Mwalimu joining the Jubilee South conference in November in Johannesburg, where the comrades were expecting to revisit his 1983 call for a Third World debtors' cartel. His passing is a great loss to that movement, and to committed African nationalists.
[PEN-L:12740] Agriculture 9
Hopefully am not disturbing the peaceful silence of pen-l this Friday, but having started this commentary on Grantham I feel I should finish it. 8. This brings me to the main point. Agriculture, like manufacturing, though perhaps not to the same degree, also possessed scope for productivity growth through increased division of labour. Bob Allen has found evidence of this in one possible response--the enlargement of farms and their transformation into specialized producers of grain or livestock products. By the eighteenth century English farming was more specialized than most farming in northern Europe, with the exception the cheese-producing districts of the Netherlands. This is, I believe, the principal reason for the statistical finding of relatively high labour productivity in England. The growing division of labour within agriculture was in turn an endogenous response to the growth of commercial outlets for produce, most prominently in and around London, but from the late seventeenth century in the industrializing regins of central and northern England. The key to point 8 is the emphasis Grantham has placed on growth through increased division of labour, which some economists have termed 'Smithian growth'. Since all the technology that was previously associated with the 'agricultural revolution' was already in place back in the early middle ages, it follows that the growth that was undeniably achieved in the 18th century, was a result of increased division of labor rather than of "increases in the stock of human knowledge", or of "technological progress proper" (to use Mokyr's phrase). This increased division of labor, or specialized farming, says G, was "the principal reason for the statistical finding of relatively high labour productivity in [18th century] England". And the reason for this increased division was "the growth of commercial outlets for produce" - in other words, if there was an 'agricultural revolution' in the 18th century, it was because of increased market opportunities, not because of increases in the stock of agricultural knowledge. I have been suggesting here, however, that there were gradual, slow increases in the stock of agricultural knowledge, particularly on the principles of mixed husbandry. Because this knowledge grew in a very gradual, uneven way, starting in the Middle Ages, it is no longer possible to identify a particular period with an "agricultural revolution", not even the 18th century. If there was such a revolution, it was probably in the 19th century, with the introduction of machines, chemical fertilizers, and scientific breeding. There is no question that increased market opportunities, and increased division of labor, are part of the story. But it would be wrong to explain the substantial increases in productivity that were achieved in the 18th century with mere increases in the division of labor. Bob Allen may have found evidence about such increases, but he has alsofound evidence about improvements in seed, including the diffusion of seed drills; improvements of soil by marling and draining; and in the cultivation of legumes, as well as in the number and breed of cattle (1994). that the sub
[PEN-L:12736] Klan to march in New York City!
The American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan have just announced they plan to march in New York City next weekend. Details on their plans and anti-fascist counter-actions will be regularly posted at http://www.anti-fascism.org. If your group or friends are planning anything, please e-mail me. Remember: just because the Klan is paranoid doesn't mean we're not out to get them! -- tallpaul editor: The Internet Anti-Fascist
[PEN-L:12738] Re: Pessimism of the intellect...
Brad De Long wrote: And voter apathy is our friend. We're not at all interested in arguing with "no" voters. We're not very interested in convincing "undecided" voters. We're interested in turning out "yes" voters. In an odd-numbered year voter participation will be perhaps 55% (instead of the 80%+ of a presidential election year). There is much to be gained by energizing the base--and much to be lost by energizing the anti-base. Gee Willikens as Orphan Annie used to say (or something like that). Brad De Long and Carrol Cox agree on something. I've been arguing for years that the best (perhaps the only) way for the left (i.e., the socialist movement) to reach "new people" is to forget about new people and direct our energies and arguments towards those who already in some sense agree with us. Mobilization Not Reach Out is the road to reaching out. Carrol
[PEN-L:12735] Julius Nyerere dies
NY Times, October 15, 1999 Julius Nyerere of Tanzania Dies; Preached African Socialism to the World By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN Julius K. Nyerere, the founding father of Tanzania who used East Africa as a pulpit from which to spread his socialist philosophy worldwide, died Thursday in London. He was about 77 and was being treated for leukemia, and he suffered a major stroke last week. An uncharacteristically humble and modest national leader whose preferred honorific was Mwalimu, the Swahili word for teacher, Nyerere led his country into independence and guided it for nearly three decades. Idealistic, principled, and some would say naïvely misguided, Nyerere became one of the most prominent of the first generation of politicians to head newly independent African states as colonialism ebbed, playing a leading role in the debate over economic inequalities between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. When he guided what had been the British Trust Territory of Tanganyika into sovereignty in 1961, he was the youngest of the continent's triumphant nationalists, a group that included Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast. When he stepped down as President 24 years later, he was only the third modern African leader to relinquish power voluntarily on a continent that by then included 50 independent states. He went neither to jail nor into exile, but to a farm in Butiama, his home village, near the shore of Lake Victoria. Nyerere ascended to power without a single shot being fired, becoming Prime Minister and then President of a land that at the time contained nine million people affiliated with more than 120 tribes, stretching from Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika down to the Indian Ocean. It was one of the poorest countries in the world. Its mostly illiterate citizens were scattered over remote regions, often unable to find a common language, although they shared ample rigors as they wrested a meager subsistence from the soil or the sea. Early Progress, Enduring Debate By the time Nyerere gave up the last vestiges of political power in 1990, when he retired as chairman of the single political party, Tanzania had undergone staggering, often traumatic, changes. The population had doubled, to more than 20 million. It had merged with Zanzibar in 1964. Almost 70 percent of the people had been prodded to move from traditional lands into paternalistically planned villages -- ujamma -- in what became Africa's largest and most debated example of social engineering. After vast investment in education, literacy rose phenomenally, and 83 percent of Tanzanians were able to read and write. Nyerere also succeeded in promoting Swahili so that it superseded dozens of tribal tongues to become a true national language. Some Western countries, notably the Scandinavians, were so impressed that they provided billions of dollars, making Tanzania one of the 10 largest recipients of foreign aid per capita. But it was still one of the poorest countries in the world. The year he left his party post, the World Bank reported that Tanzanians were surviving on a per-capita income of $200 a year, and that the economy had shrunk on average half a percentage point a year between 1965 and 1988. The debate over Nyerere's leadership extended beyond his tenure, with academics, politicians and development strategists often dividing sharply over his legacy. His domestic and international defenders, generally people of the left, praised his emphasis on social investments and his egalitarian economic policies, crediting them with creating a culturally cohesive nation that avoided ethnic conflict while life expectancy, literacy and access to water increased. His Tanzanian supporters took pride in Nyerere's reputation as one of the most prominent proponents of a new economic order that would benefit the developing south in economic relations with the industrial north. Nyerere also gained international prestige for his principled support of the struggles for majority rule in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola, and for Tanzania's military counter offensive against Idi Amin of Uganda, which routed the dictator and sent him into exile. The third world honored him, and he won the respect of such Western leaders as Olof Palme, Pierre Trudeau, Willy Brandt and Jimmy Carter. Still, his critics, who included free-market liberals and conservatives, condemned him for adopting paternalistic and coercive policies like ujamma. They deplored his insistence on one-party rule and price controls, which they said stultified Tanzania's economy, shrank agricultural production, encouraged corruption and led to vast squandering of foreign aid. . . (full article at http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/africa/101599nyerere-obit.html) Louis Proyect (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
