VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, [2], 3, 4 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 15:52:52 01/11/02 Fri
Author: Michel Chossudovsky
Subject: The IMF & World Bank

The IMF & World Bank
Two of Several Instruments of National Destruction - Part I
Part I of an interview with Michel Chossudovsky
Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa
Interview and editing by Jared Israel (4-16-00)
www.tenc.net [emperors-clothes]

· Chossudovsky: When an IMF mission goes into a country and requires the destruction of social and economic institutions as a condition for lending money - this is very similar to the physical destruction caused by NATO bombing. The IMF will order the closing down of hospitals, schools and factories. That's of course more cost effective than bombing those hospitals, schools and factories, as they did in Yugoslavia, but the ultimate result is very similar: the destruction of the country.

The IMF has what is called the MAI - the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. It's the ultimate investment treaty. Signing leads to the economic destruction of the targeted country. Well, really, war is simply the MAI of last resort.
Jared: What are your thoughts on the demands of the folks protesting now in Washington?
Chossudovsky: Well, lots of people have converged on Washington to protest the Bretton Woods system, the IMF and the World Bank. The question is: what are we fighting for? I suspect the dominant position among the NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] is still that we need to reform these institutions, give them a human face, make them work for the poor and so forth. I think this approach, which developed from the "50 Years Is Enough" campaign against the Bretton Woods institutions is a mistake. And increasingly people are challenging it, questioning the legitimacy of these Washington institutions.
But still there's a lot of confusion. Some think the IMF and World Bank are playing contradictory roles, which is not so. And also there's a tendency to see these institutions in isolation. In fact they are simply two tools used by the Western elite to destroy nations, to turn them into territories.
Jared: You think some people are fooled by the World Bank?
Chossudovsky: They believe the World Bank has adopted a humane approach, that it's involved in poverty alleviation whereas the IMF creates poverty. Or they even think there's a conflict between the two. That's nonsense. The World Bank is doing essentially the same job as the IMF; it merely has different responsibilities in the Third World. In a way, it is far more dangerous precisely because [of the fact that] its supposed mandate to alleviate poverty disarms critics. The simple fact is: Wall Street is behind both these institutions. They are run by bankers not sociologists.
Free Trade, brother of War
Chossudovsky: More important: a lot of people don't see the link to NATO. Very few of the organizations criticizing the Bretton Woods institutions opposed the attack on Yugoslavia. They didn't talk about it in Seattle and they aren't doing it in Washington now. They campaign against free trade, against the IMF, in favor of the Jubilee campaign to cancel third world debt, but not against war. But free trade and war go hand in hand. It was true with the British in the 19th century when they forced the Chinese to "freely" purchase opium and it is true today.
And there's a good deal of coordination between the IMF and NATO. You saw it in Kosovo. The IMF and the World Bank had set up a postwar economic plan including free market reforms well before the onset of bombing. [See note #1 at the end] They work together. If a country refuses IMF intervention, NATO steps in, or NATO and various covert agencies, and they create the proper conditions for IMF programs to be imposed.
Israel: Very sharp point.
Chossudovsky: The countries that accept the IMF, like Bulgaria and Romania, they may not get bombed but they are destroyed with the pen. In Bulgaria the IMF implemented the most drastic reforms, IMF medicine, which decimated social conditions - pensions slashed, factories closed, dumping of cheap finished goods, elimination of free medical care and transportation services and so on.
And it's not just NATO. We see that in Central Asia and the Caucuses. Hand in hand with the imposition of IMF and World Bank reforms and privatization program we have not only NATO but also CIA covert intelligence operations - the institutions of war and economic management interface with one another at a global level.
So right now various countries are being softened up with regional conflicts that are financed overtly and covertly by the Western elite. The KLA is just one example of an externally financed insurgency. You see these manipulated conflicts especially wherever there are strategic pipelines, and they are linked to the drug trade and the CIA, covertly, then openly linked to NATO and official US foreign policy, and finally to the IMF, the World Bank and regional banks and private investors. Links in a chain.
Let's categorize these global institutions: you've got the United Nations system and peace keeping; they play a role and they are interfacing with NATO as well. Then you've got the IMF and the World Bank, and the regional development banks like the ADB, the Asian Development Bank, and so on. In Europe it's the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. These are the main arms.
Sometimes war creates the conditions, and then the economic institutions come in and pick up the pieces. Or conversely the IMF itself does the destabilizing, as they did in Indonesia. They insisted on cutting off transfer payments to the various states in the federation. Now that fractures a country like Indonesia which has 2,000 islands with a system of local governments. It is the geography of the bloody place. So they leave these islands to their own devices.
Do you see what that accomplishes?
Israel: In other words, they insisted on cutting money that was supposed to subsidize local government?
Chossudovsky: Yes, for example for education and so on. By doing this - and incidentally they did it in Brazil as well - they destabilize the country because in order to have a country there must be fiscal coherence, a system of fiscal transfers. So in a place like Indonesia, each of these islands becomes a small state. And of course now the idea of going it alone becomes far more attractive to the many different ethnic groups. Of course they [that is, the planners] are fully aware of this - they have made it happen time and again. It took place in Yugoslavia; it took place in Brazil; it took place in the former Soviet Union where the regions are left to their own devices because Moscow doesn't transfer any money. Potentially it could happen in the United States as well. It is guaranteed to produce a situation of conflict, internal strife.
Israel: Mutually unproductive conflict…
Chossudovsky: Yes because people are impoverished to such an extent that they start fighting.
Israel: On every basis, especially ethnic.
Chossudovsky: Incidentally in Somalia there weren't any ethnic groups, but it worked there too. You don't need a multi-ethnic society to have divisions, to have Balkanization.
Israel: And you're saying this is part and parcel of a plan for Empire?
Chossudovsky: I am saying this is recolonization. Countries are transformed into territories, colonies essentially.
Israel: What distinguishes the two?
Countries vs. territories
Chossudovsky: A country has a government. It has institutions. It has a budget. It has economic borders. It has customs. A territory has only a nominal government, controlled by the IMF. No schools and hospitals, as those have been closed down on orders of the World Bank. No borders because the WTO has ordered free trade. No industry or agriculture because these have been destabilized as the result of interest rates of 60% per anum and that is also the IMF program.
Israel: 60% per year?
Chossudovsky: In Brazil it's much higher. I'm looking at Botswana now. The interest rate is horrendously high.
Israel: And this is imposed by the IMF?
Chossudovsky: They put a ceiling on credit. Do you see? So people can't get bank loans; it drives interest sky high and that kills the economy. Then they open it up to free trade. So the local capitalist enterprises have to borrow at 60% from the local banks and then they have to compete with commodities from the United States or Europe where interest rates are 6 or 7%. These reforms are essentially aimed at destroying local capitalism.
Israel: So how do we fight this?
Chossudovsky: Not with a single-issue movement. We can't focus solely on the Bretton Woods institutions, or the WTO, or environmental issues or genetic engineering; we have to look at the totality of relations. When we look at the totality we see the link to the use of force.
Beneath this economic system lie the undercover features of the capitalist order: the military-industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus and the links to organized crime including the use of narcotics to finance conflicts aimed at opening nations to Western control.
We have gone from gunboat diplomacy to missile diplomacy. In fact it is not missile diplomacy. It is sheer bombing.
Israel: You said that part of the military intelligence apparatus is gangsters. I know that you have been writing material about how drugs is actually an economically powerful force.
Chossudovsky: Well it is more complicated than that. Because in fact the gangsters are the instruments of big capital. They are not - they don't overshadow the system in any way. The gangsters are people who can be easily used precisely because they are not responsible to anybody. So it is much more convenient.
Let's say you install Hacim Thaci [leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army] in the seat of government in Kosovo. It's much more convenient to have a gangster like this running a country than to have an elected prime minister that is responsible to citizens.
The best thing is to have an elected gangster, somebody like Boris Yeltsin, that's the best - get an elected gangster. We have elected gangsters in the US as well.
Why? Because elected gangsters are much easier to control than elected non-gangsters. But we must understand these gangsters are pretty obviously subordinate - when we say it is the criminalization of the colony, it is not true. It's the other way around. You are never going to have a situation where these gangsters will be given any power. The big ones perhaps... So there is a certain interpenetration of legal and illicit trade. But in effect illicit trade is always subordinate to large scale financial and business undertakings.
An important aspect of this is that the IMF creates the conditions for the growth of illicit trade and for the laundering of dirty money, all over the world. That is very clear because when legal economies collapse under the brunt of IMF reforms what are you left with? It's the grey economy; it's the criminal economy.
Israel: And that encourages the development of forces that can be used to replace potentially responsible legal forces.
Chossudovsky: Yes and that type of collapse in legal economic systems creates also the conditions for developing insurgencies, destabilizing elected governments, closing down of institutions and transforming countries into territories which are then run as colonies.
Dear reader - this interview is continued. Part II will be posted as soon as the text is edited and laid out. - JI
***
Note # 1 "In Opening Kosovo to foreign capital" which you can read in full at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/opening.htm, Michel Chossudovsky writes:
· "In occupied Kosovo under the mandate of UN peace-keeping, state terror and the 'free market' go hand in hand. The concurrent criminalisation of State institutions is not incompatible with the West’s economic and strategic objectives in the Balkans. Notwithstanding the massacres of civilians, the self-proclaimed KLA administration has committed itself to establishing a 'secure and stable environment' for foreign investors and international financial institutions. ..

"In close liaison with NATO, the Washington based financial institutions had already analyzed the consequences of an eventual military intervention leading to the occupation of Kosovo: almost a year prior to the beginning of the War, the World Bank conducted 'simulations' which 'anticipated the possibility of an emergency scenario arising out of the tensions in Kosovo'. 1

"While the bombing was still ongoing, the World Bank and the European Commission were given a special mandate for 'coordinating donors' economic assistance in the Balkans'2. The underlying terms of reference did not exclude Yugoslavia from receiving donor support. It was, however, clearly stipulated that Belgrade would be eligible for reconstruction loans 'once political conditions there change'.3

"With regard to Kosovo, the World Bank rather than providing loans to rebuild the province’s infrastructure has focussed its intervention on providing 'assistance in designing the reconstruction and recovery program' as well as so-called 'policy advice in economic management' and 'institution building' namely 'governance' 4. In other words, an army of lawyers and consultants have been sent in to ensure Kosovo’s transition to a 'thriving, open and transparent market economy.' 5

Support granted to the KLA provisional government would be geared towards 'the establish[ment] [of] transparent, effective and sustainable institutions' 6. An 'enabling environment' for foreign capital is to be established alongside suitably devised 'social safety nets' and 'poverty alleviation programs'.

"Meanwhile, Yugoslav State banks operating in Pristina have been closed down. The Deutschmark has been adopted as legal tender and the banking system has been handed over to Germany’s Commerzbank A.G which is the sole private shareholder in [Kosovo's] Micro Enterprise Bank (MEB) formed in early 2000 at the initiative of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) together with the Nederlandse Financierings-Maatschappij voor Ontwikkelingslanden (FMO), Germany’s Internationale Micro Investitionen (IMI) and Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW). [Thus the German] Commerzbank AG will gain control over commercial banking functions for the province [of Kosovo] including money transfers and foreign exchange transactions."7
[To check out the refernces in the above text please see the original at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/opening.htm ]




PART II
The IMF-World Bank's
"Economic Medicine"
by Michel Chossudovsky (April 9, 2000)
Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa
· Through the imposition of deadly macroeconomic medicine, the IMF and the World Bank are responsible for destroying national economies and impoverishing millions of people.
Since the early 1980s, the "macro-economic stabilization" and "structural adjustment" programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on developing countries (as a condition for the renegotiations of their external debt) have led to the impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people. Contrary to the spirit of the Bretton Woods agreement which was predicated on "economic reconstruction" and stability of major exchange rates, the structural adjustment program has largely contributed to destabilizing national currencies and ruining the economies of developing countries.
Internal purchasing power has collapsed, famines have erupted, health clinics and schools have been closed down, hundreds of millions of children have been denied the right to primary education.
In several regions of the developing World, the IMF-imposed reforms have been conducive to a resurgence of infectious diseases including tuberculosis, malaria and cholera. While the World Bank's mandate consists in "combating poverty" and protecting the environment, its support to large scale hydroelectric and agro-industrial projects has also speeded up the process of deforestation and the destruction of the natural environment, leading to the forced displacement and eviction of several million people.
Global Geopolitics
In the aftermath of the Cold War, macro-economic restructuring also supports global geopolitical interests. Structural adjustment is used to undermine the economy of the former Soviet block and dismantle its system of State enterprises. Since the late 1980s, the IMF-World Bank "economic medicine" has been imposed on Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union with devastating economic and social consequences.
While the social and institutional framework is fundamentally distinct, a form of structural adjustment has also been applied in the developed countries. Whereas the macro-economic therapies under the jurisdiction of national governments, tend to be less brutal than those imposed on the South and the East, the theoretical and ideological underpinnings are broadly similar. The same global financial interests are served. Monetarism is applied on a World scale, the process of global economic restructuring strikes at the very heart of the rich countries. The consequences are unemployment, low wages and the marginalisation of large sectors of the population. Social expenditures are curtailed and many of the achievements of the Welfare State are repealed. State policies have also encouraged the destruction of small and medium sized enterprises. Low levels of food consumption and malnutrition are also hitting the urban poor in the rich countries. According to a recent study, 30 million people in the United States are classified as "hungry"...
Since the mid-1980s, the impact of structural adjustment including the derogation of the social rights of women and the detrimental environmental consequences of economic reform have been amply documented. While the Bretton Woods institutions have acknowledged "the social impact of adjustment", no shift in policy direction is in sight. In fact since the late 1980s coinciding with the collapse of the Eastern block, the IMF-World Bank policy prescriptions (now imposed in the name of "poverty alleviation") have become increasingly harsh and unyielding.
Social Polarization and the Concentration of Wealth
In the South, the East and the North, a privileged social minority has accumulated vast amounts of wealth at the expense of the large majority of the population. This new international financial order feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the natural environment. It generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife, undermines the rights of women and often precipitates countries into destructive confrontations between nationalities. Moreover, these reforms --when applied simultaneously in more than one hundred countries-- are conducive to a "globalization of poverty", a process which undermines human livelihood and destroys civil society in the South, the East and the North.
The Role of Global Institutions
Global institutions play an important role in the process of restructuring national economies. The ratification of the GATT agreement and the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) marks a landmark in the development of the global economic system. The WTO's mandate consists in regulating World trade to the benefit of the international banks and transnational corporations as well as "supervising" the enforcement of national trade policies. The GATT agreement violates fundamental peoples' rights, particularly in the areas of foreign investment, bio-diversity and intellectual property rights.
In other words, a new "triangular division of authority" has unfolded based on the close collaboration of the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the "surveillance" of developing countries' economic policies. Under the new trade order (which emerges from the completion of the Uruguay Round at Marrakesh), the relationship of the Washington based institutions to national governments is to be redefined. Enforcement of IMF-World Bank policy prescriptions no longer hinges solely upon ad hoc country-level loan agreements (which are not "legally binding" documents). Many of the clauses of the structural adjustment program (e.g. trade liberalization and the foreign investment regime) will become permanently entrenched in the articles of agreement of the new World Trade Organization (WTO). These articles will set the foundations for "policing" countries (and enforcing "conditionalities") according to international law.
The IMF Menu
The same "menu" of budgetary austerity, devaluation, trade liberalization and privatization is applied simultaneously in more than 100 indebted countries. Debtor nations forego economic sovereignty and control over fiscal and monetary policy, the Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance are reorganized (often with the complicity of the local bureaucracies), State institutions are undone and an "economic tutelage" is installed. A "parallel government" which bypasses civil society is established by the international financial institutions (IFIs). Countries which do not conform to the IMF's "performance targets" are black-listed. While adopted in the name of "democracy" and so-called "good governance", the structural adjustment program requires the strengthening of the internal security apparatus: political repression --with the collusion of the Third World elites-- supports a parallel process of "economic repression".
"Good Governance" and the holding of multi-party elections are added conditions imposed by the donors and creditors, yet the very nature of the economic reforms, precludes a genuine democratization, --i.e. their implementation invariably requires (contrary to the "spirit of Anglo-Saxon liberalism") the backing of the Military and of the authoritarian State. Structural adjustment promotes bogus institutions and a fake parliamentary democracy which in turn supports the process of economic restructuring.
Throughout the Third World, the situation is one of social desperation and hopelessness of a population impoverished by the interplay of market forces, anti-SAP riots and popular uprisings are brutally repressed: Caracas, 1989, President Carlos Andres Perez after having rhetorically denounced the IMF of practicing "an economic totalitarianism which kills not with bullets but with famine", declares a state of emergency and sends regular units of the infantry and the marines into the slum areas (barrios de ranchos) on the hills overlooking the capital. The Caracas anti-IMF riots had been sparked off as a result of a 200 percent increase in the price of bread. Men, women and children were fired upon indiscriminately: "The Caracas morgue was reported to have up to 200 bodies of people killed in the first three days ... and warned that it was running out of coffins". Unofficially more than a thousand people were killed. Tunis, January 1984: the bread riots largely instigated by unemployed youth protesting the rise of food prices; Nigeria: 1989, the anti-SAP student riots lead to the closing of six of the country's universities by the Armed Forces Ruling Council; Morocco: 1990, a General Strike and a popular uprising against the government's IMF sponsored reforms; Mexico 1993: the insurrection of the Zapatista Liberation Army in the Chiapas region of Southern Mexico, protest movements in the Russian Federation and the storming of the Russian parliament, and so on, the list is long...
Economic Genocide
Structural adjustment is conducive to a form of "economic genocide" which is carried out through the conscious and deliberate manipulation of market forces. When compared to genocide at various periods of colonial history (e.g. forced labor and slavery), its social impact is devastating. Structural adjustment programs directly affect the livelihood of more than four billion people. The application of the structural adjustment program in a large number of individual debtor countries favors the "internationalization" of macro-economic policy under the direct control of the IMF and the World Bank acting on behalf of powerful financial and political interests (e.g. the Paris and London Clubs, the G 7). This new form of economic and political domination --a form of "market colonialism"-- subordinates people and governments through the seemingly neutral interplay of market forces. The Washington based international bureaucracy has been entrusted by the international creditors and multinational corporations with the execution of a global economic design which affects the livelihood of more than 80 percent of the world's population. At no time in history, has the "free" market --operating at a World through the instruments of macro-economics-- played such an important role in shaping the destiny of "sovereign" nations.
Destroying the National Economy
The restructuring of the World economy under the guidance of the Washington based financial institutions increasingly denies individual developing countries the possibility of building a national economy: the internationalization of macro-economic policy transforms countries into open economic territories and national economies into "reserves" of cheap labor and natural resources. The application of the IMF "economic medicine" tends to further depress World commodity prices because it forces individual countries to simultaneously gear their national economies towards a shrinking World market.
At the heart of global economic system, lies an unequal structure of trade, production and credit which defines the role and position of developing countries in the global economy. What is nature of this unfolding world economic system, on what structure of global poverty and income inequality is it based? By the turn of the century, the World population will be six billion of which five billion will be living in poor countries. While the rich countries with some 15 percent of the World population control close to 80 percent of total World income, some 58 percent of the World population representing the group of "low income countries" (including India and China) with a population of over three billion people, received in 1991 approximately 5 percent of total World income, less than the GDP of France and its overseas territories. With a population of more than 500 million people, the gross product of the entire Sub-Saharan African region is approximately half that of the State of Texas. Together the lower and middle income countries (including the former "socialist" countries and the former Soviet Union) representing some 84.3 percent of World population receive less than 20 percent of total World income.
In many indebted Third World countries, real salaried earnings in the modern sector have declined by more than sixty percent since the beginning of the 1980s. The situation of the informal sector and the unemployed is even more critical. In Nigeria under the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida, for instance, the minimum wage declined by 85 percent in the course of the 1980s. Wages in Vietnam were below $10 a month while the domestic price of rice had risen to the World level as a result of the IMF program carried out by the Hanoi government: a Hanoi secondary school teacher, for instance, with a University degree received a monthly salary of less than 15 dollars A similar pattern exists in the former Soviet Union: domestic prices are "dollarised" whereas the monthly minimum wage is below 10 dollars a month. In Peru, in the aftermath of the IMF-World Bank sponsored Fujishock implemented by President Alberto Fujimori in August 1990, fuel prices increased by 31 times overnight whereas the price of bread increased by 12 times. The real minimum wage had declined by more than ninety percent (in relation to its level of the mid-seventies). Whereas an agricultural worker in Peru's Northern provinces was (in August 1990) receiving $7.50 a month, the domestic prices of many consumer goods in Lima were higher than in New York.
The Dollarisation of Prices
While there are sizeable variations in the cost of living between developing and developed countries, devaluation combined with trade liberalization and the deregulation of domestic commodity markets (under the structural adjustment program) is conducive to the dollarisation of domestic prices. Increasingly, the domestic prices of basic food staples are brought up to their world market levels. This new World economic order, while based on the internationalization of commodity prices and a fully integrated World commodity market, increasingly functions in terms of a watertight separation between two distinct "labor markets". In other words, this global market system is characterized by a duality in the structure of wages and labor costs between rich and poor countries. Whereas prices are unified and brought up to World levels, wages (and labor costs) in the Third World and Eastern Europe are as much as seventy times lower than in the OECD countries.
Income disparities between nations are superimposed on extremely wide income disparities between social-income groups within nations. In many Third World countries, at least 60 percent of national income is concentrated in the upper 20 percent of the population. In many low and middle income developing countries, 70 percent of rural households have a per capita income which is between 10 and 20 percent of the national average. These vast disparities in income within and between countries are the consequence of the structure of commodity trade and the unequal international division of labor which imparts to the Third World and more recently to the countries of the former Soviet block a subordinate status in the global economic system. These disparities have widened in the course of the 1980s and 1990s as a result of the "remolding" of indebted Third World economies under the structural adjustment program. The issue is consequently much broader and complex than that pertaining to the deterioration of the terms of trade and the downward movement of real commodity prices.
The "Thirdworldization" of the Former Eastern Block
The end of the Cold War has had a profound impact on the global distribution of income. Until recently, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were considered as part of the developed "North", --i.e. with levels of material consumption, education, health, scientific development, etc. broadly comparable to those prevailing in the OECD countries. Whereas average incomes were on the whole lower, Western scholars nonetheless acknowledged the achievements of the Eastern block countries particularly in the areas of health and education.
Impoverished as a result of the IMF sponsored reforms, the countries of the former socialist block, are now categorized by the World Bank as "developing economies", alongside the "low" and "middle income countries" of the Third World. The Central Asian republics appear next to Syria, Jordan and Tunisia in the "lower middle-income" category, whereas the Russian Federation is next to Brazil with a per capita income of the order of $3000. This shift in categories reflects the outcome of the Cold War and the underlying process of "thirdworldisation" of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Economic Ideology Distorts Causes of Global Poverty
In parallel with the "remolding" of the global economy, the dominant economic discourse has, since the early 1980s, reinforced its clutch in academic and research institutions throughout the World: critical analysis is strongly discouraged, social and economic reality is to be seen through a single set of fictitious economic relations which serve the useful purpose of concealing the workings of the global economic system. Mainstream economic scholarship produces theory without facts ("pure theory") and facts without theory ("applied economics"): the dominant economic dogma admits neither dissent nor discussion of it main theoretical paradigm: the universities' main function is to produce a generation of loyal and dependable economists who are incapable of unveiling the social foundations of the global market economy. Similarly, Third World intellectuals are increasingly enlisted in support of the neo-liberal paradigm, the internationalization of economic "science" unreservedly supports the process of global economic restructuring.
This "official" neoliberal dogma also creates its own "counter-paradigm" embodying a highly moral and ethical discourse. The latter focuses on "sustainable development" and "poverty alleviation" while distorting and "stylizing" the policy issues pertaining to poverty, the protection of the environment and the social rights of women. This "counter-ideology" rarely challenges neoliberal policy prescriptions. It develops alongside and in harmony rather than in opposition to the official neoliberal dogma.
Within this counter-ideology (which is generously funded by the research establishment) development scholars find a comfortable niche. Their role is to generate within this counter-discourse a semblance of critical debate without addressing the social foundations of the global market system. The World Bank plays in this regard a key role by promoting research on poverty and the so-called "social dimensions of adjustment". This ethical focus and the underlying categories (e.g. poverty alleviation, gender issues, equity, etc.) provides a "human face" to the world Bank and a semblance of commitment to social change. However, inasmuch as this analysis is functionally divorced from an understanding of the main macro-economic reforms, it rarely constitutes a threat to the dominant neoliberal economic paradigm.
***
Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa, is author of The Globalization of Poverty, Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms, TWN, Penang and Zed Books, London, 1997.
© Copyright by Michel Chossudovsky, Ottawa, 1998. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to post this text on noncommercial community internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To publish this text in printed and/or other forms contact the author at chossudovsky@videotron.ca, fax: 1-514-4256224.
Further Reading...
For a look at how the IMF-World Bank combo has impacted on Bulgaria, see the following.
With her eyes opened; a letter to the Serbian Opposition at http://emperors-clothes.com/misc/bulgaria.htm
'Slavery is Freedom' - a second letter to theSerbian opposition at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/doncheva/donch4.htm
A Tale of Two Articles at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/doncheva/donch3.htm
We here think it has been planned (on East Timor) at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/doncheva/donch2.htm

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.