Ha-Joon Chang: 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism.

Professor Ha Joon Chang om Finanskrisens ophav

Der var forleden et interessant interview med den syd-koreansk fødte professor i udviklingsøkonomi v. Cambridge, som jeg fandt oplysende, og derfor linker til.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what are neoliberal policies? And then you can critique them.


HA-JOON CHANG: Yes. Well, basically, the reason why it’s called “neoliberal” is that it’s a successor to nineteenth century classical liberal doctrine. I mean, “liberal” in American usage usually means kind of the left to the center, but in the European usage, “liberal” means basically belief in the free market and private ownership and basically rule of money.


Now, neoliberals have moderated some of the old liberal beliefs. For example, the old liberals actually thought that democracy was bad for capitalism. You know, they thought if you have democracy, poor people vote and create things like income tax, which they have, but, I mean, it actually helped the economy rather than destroyed the economy like the liberals said. So the neoliberals [inaudible] some degree of progressive income tax. The liberals used to be against, for example, having a central bank. The neoliberals actually like the central bank pumping money into the economy when things are going wrong. So it has modified the classical liberal doctrine, but neoliberalism still has, in its core, belief in free market, free trade, deregulated economy and private ownership.


AMY GOODMAN: Do you find it funny that you’re saying—that Gordon Brown is saying what you have been saying for a while—


HA-JOON CHANG: That’s right, yeah.


AMY GOODMAN: —talking about the hypocrisy of the West? But explain what that is, what the US has done or what the West has done with poorer countries when they’re in trouble, and then what we do when we’re in trouble.


HA-JOON CHANG: That’s right, yeah. For example, when the developing countries go into financial crises like the rich countries are experiencing today, they were told by the IMF and the World Bank, and ultimately the rich country governments which control these institutions, that they have to cut spending; ideally, they should run budget surplus. They have to raise interest rate to 30, 50, even 80 percent in some countries. And basically, they have to tighten the belt. Now that the rich countries have the financial crisis, they have cut interest rate to practically zero. You know, I mean, when South Korea had its financial crisis back in 1997, the IMF insisted that the country runs budget surplus equivalent to one percent of GDP. This year in the US alone, budget deficit is estimated to be equivalent to something like 12 percent of GDP.


Now, I mean, how do you explain that? I mean, that these policies are not good enough for you? I mean, “We’ll use one set of policy, which we think are the good ones, but you have to use something else.” You know, the American writer Gore Vidal once upon a time famously said that the American economic system is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, and the international macroeconomic policies have been like that. I mean, it’s what I call monetarism for the poor and Keynesianism for the rich. So when the rich countries have a fall in demand, they think nothing of boosting it up by printing money and increasing government spending; the poor countries shouldn’t do that.


Now, it’s not only the macroeconomic policy where this hypocrisy has a role. For example, the rich countries have been telling the developing countries to adopt free trade and told them, “Look, I mean, all countries in history probably, with the possible exception of Japan, have become richer through free trade. So how do you think that you guys can manage it otherwise?” Well, actually, if you look at the British history, American history, you find that today’s rich countries used protectionism, center, left and right, when they were developing countries. You know, I mean, for about one century, until the Second World War, the United States was actually the most protectionist country in the world. You know, there’s something there when Pat Buchanan said free trade is not free American, because in its 200 years of history, it has practiced free trade only for about fifty years.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/10/economist_ha_joon_chang_on_the

Neoliberalisme og udviklingsøkonomier

Den tidligere CIA-analytiker og professor emeritus i politologi, Chalmers Johnson havde forleden en ret interessant artikel på Truthdig, hvor han gennemgår den prisvindende Cambridge-økonom Ha-Joon Changs nyeste bog "Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World".

Udrag:

In Chang’s conception, there are two kinds of Bad Samaritans. There are the genuine, powerful “ladder-kickers” working in the “unholy trinity” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Then there are the “ideologues—those who believe in Bad Samaritan policies because they think those policies are ‘right,’ not because they personally benefit from them much, if at all.” Both groups adhere to a doctrine they call “neoliberalism.” It became the dominant economic model of the English-speaking world in the 1970s and prevails at the present time. Neoliberalism (sometimes called the “Washington Consensus") is a rerun of what economists suffering from “historical amnesia” believe were the key characteristics of the international economy in the golden age of liberalism (1870-1913).

Thomas Friedman calls this complex of policies the “Golden Straitjacket,” the wearing of which, no matter how uncomfortable, is allegedly the only route to economic success. The complex includes privatizing state-owned enterprises, maintaining low inflation, shrinking the size of the state bureaucracy, balancing the national budget, liberalizing trade, deregulating foreign investment, making the currency freely convertible, reducing corruption, and privatizing pensions. It is called neoliberalism because of its acceptance of rich-country monopolies over intellectual property rights (patents, copyrights, etc.), the granting to a country’s central bank of a monopoly to issue bank notes, and its assertion that political democracy is conducive to economic growth, none of which were parts of classical liberalism. The Golden Straitjacket is what the unholy trinity tries to force on poor countries. It is the doctrinal orthodoxy taught in all mainstream academic economics departments and for which numerous Nobel prizes in economics have been awarded.

In addition to being an economist, Ha-Joon Chang is a historian and an empiricist (as distinct from a deductive theorist working from what are stipulated to be laws of economic behavior). He notes that the histories of today’s rich countries contradict virtually all the Golden Straitjacket dicta, many of which are logically a result rather than a cause of economic growth (for example, trade liberalization). His basic conclusion: “Practically all of today’s developed countries, including Britain and the US, the supposed homes of the free market and free trade, have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that go against neo-liberal economics.” All of today’s rich countries used protection and subsidies to encourage their manufacturing industries, and they discriminated powerfully against foreign investors. All such policies are anathema in today’s economic orthodoxy and are now severely restricted by multilateral treaties, like the WTO agreements, and proscribed by aid donors and international financial organizations, particularly the IMF and the World Bank.

The Third World was not always poor and economically stagnant. Throughout the golden age of capitalism, from the Marshall Plan (1947) to the first oil shock (1973), the United States was a Good Samaritan and helped developing countries by allowing them to protect and subsidize their nascent industries. The developing world has never done better, before or since. But then, in the 1970s, scared that its position as global hegemon was being undermined, the United States turned decisively toward neoliberalism. It ordered the unholy trinity to bring the developing countries to heel. Through draconian interventions into the most intimate details of the lives of their clients, including birth control, ethnic integration, and gender equality as well as tariffs, foreign investment, privatization decisions, national budgets, and intellectual property protection, the IMF, World Bank, and WTO managed drastically to slow down economic growth in the Third World. Forced to adopt neoliberal policies and to open their economies to much more powerful foreign competitors on unequal terms, their growth rate fell to less than half of that recorded in the 1960s (1.7 percent instead of 4.5 percent).

Since the 1980s, Africa has actually experienced a fall in living standards—which should be a damning indictment of neoliberal orthodoxy because most African economies have been virtually run by the IMF and the World Bank over the past quarter-century. The disaster has been so complete that it has helped expose the hidden governance structures that allow the IMF and the World Bank to foist Bad Samaritan policies on helpless nations. The United States has a de facto veto in both organizations, where rich countries control 60 percent of the voting shares. The WTO has a democratic structure (it had to accept one in order to enact its founding treaty) but is actually run by an oligarchy. Votes are never taken.

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Videre læsning

Ha-Joon Chang: "Kicking Away the Ladder: The “Real” History of Free Trade" - Foreign Policy in Focus.

Læs derudover i forlængelse af ovenstående min anmeldelse af Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" der ligeledes omhandler udviklingsøkonomi og neoliberalistisme.