On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> quoted:
from this
>week's Economist. The factors making for prosperity are similar to the
>minimum conditions I posited in my recent posting ("When Globalisation
>doesn't work"):
>
><<<<
>THE PROSPERITY LEAGUE
>
>How economic freedom is good if you're poor
>
>PROTESTERS from the richer bits of the world are preparing to descend on
>the Canadian Rockies next week, to make mischief at and around the G8
>summit. They, along with the world's political leaders and others
>concerned
>with economic growth, would do well to give their custom to one locally
>sourced product: the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World
>report, an annual publication that aims to measure economic freedoms in
>123 countries.
Unfortunately, the "Fraser Institute" is widely known and understood
in this part of the world to be such a blatantly shameless sycophantic
propaganda machine for megacorporate hegemony (from which they derive all
their funding) that if they issued a report declaring that the sky was
blue, everyone would rush to their windows to discover what colour
it had actually turned. It is never worth the trouble to try to
untangle the mess left by the high rpm spin on their pronouncements to
extract what litle actual fact is buried under it.
-Pete Vincent
It ranks each country according to how seriously various
factors
are taken, including small government and low taxes, protection of private
property from expropriation and monetary debasement, and the ability to
trade freely with other countries.
It is no longer news that these things correlate with wealth and economic
growth, but it was once. At a conference in the 1980s, Milton Friedman, a
Nobel laureate, asserted that economic freedoms led to greater wealth
creation. A colleague stood up and challenged him to prove it. Thus was
born the report, which relies on detailed assessments of 37 variables of
economic freedom.
This year, some of the usual suspects occupy the top slots, based on 2000
data: Hong Kong, Singapore and America are the top three. At the bottom
come such impoverished states as Guinea-Bissau, Myanmar and Congo. Cuba and
North Korea, which are almost certainly even less economically free than
these, are unranked, for lack of data. Meanwhile, one African country,
Botswana, has climbed up the rankings and is now reckoned to be as
economically free as France. As you might expect, the countries with the
greatest economic freedom saw much higher growth rates, between 1990 and
2000, than their less free peers.
One myth of the anti-free-trade crowd is quickly debunked by the authors.
Anti-globalisers, and those merely scornful of Anglo-Saxon capitalism,
argue that in liberal countries wealth is concentrated in the hands of a
privileged few. Globalisation may lead to riches, but it also leads to such
vast inequality that the poor are excluded. The report shows this to be
nonsense.
As it turns out, the poorest fifth of the population in all the countries
studied receives around 2-3% of national income. This is true both for more
laisser-faire economies and for more restrictive places where policies are
designed, say their leaders, to protect the poor from the forces of
globalisation.
The poor themselves are not likely to give thanks for the protection. For
the less economically free a country, the worse off are its poorest
members. In 2000 the income of the poorest tenth in the least free
countries was around $728. Meanwhile, the poorest 10% in the freest
countries did nearly ten times as well, with an average income of $7,017.
And the elites in the most closed economies take as large a share of
national income as those in the freest.
The authors note that, beyond making people richer, economic freedoms also
make them politically freer, citing a strong link between economic freedoms
and democracy. Hong Kong, as ever, is the exception—though not a willing
one—to the rule.
©The Economist July 2002
>>>>
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Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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