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Reclaiming the right to development
Levitt, Kari Polanyi
Levitt, Kari Polanyi
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Abstract
"The authority of the United Nations has declined. Private global capital flows have displaced official development assistance as a major source of external finance. Market criteria of profitability (cost-recovery) have prevailed over egalitarian social criteria in the provision of public goods directly affecting the well being of people. International inequalities have escalated. Domestic disparities have widened in most countries Commodity prices continue to fall. Finance has been privileged at the expense of productive activity and countries open to capital flows have born the full economic, social and human costs of adjustment to ever more frequent and damaging financial and economic crises Primary commodity exporters have always been price -takers. They have always been forced to adjust to business cycles in the industrial centers by pro-cyclical policies. Thanks to twenty years of "structural adjustment", they have also become policy takers. Development as a national and social project supported by the international community is in suspense -. in large regions of the world in regression. A rising tide of outrage at global inequities has attracted the attention of the world. There is a growing sense that "globalization" is a non territorial form of imperialism, imposed on developing countries by legally binding obligations of compliance with rules favouring capital, enforced by trade sanctions and denial of access to finance Additonal conditionalities relating to "governance", some at the insistence of influential international NGOs . further constrain policy autonomy. Scores of countries have been encouraged - sometimes bullied - into excessive dependence on export earnings and foreign credits by programmes designed by the staffs of the 2 Bretton Woods Institutions The International Monetary Fund has become a foreign policy instrument of the United States. Crises have been used as opportunities to radically restructure economies - most scandalously in the case of South Korea."(pg 2-3)
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2001-09-07
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