Checking the Bank

[Ben Crow <bencrow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tell us more, Tavis, about how you envisage URPE or some other
grouping taking on the Bank's interpretation of East Asian
industrialization. I think the Bank's publication is a worthy
target. It is definitely a step on from the simple export
orientation plus liberalization models of earlier Bank reports,
but I suspect a careful analysis will highlight a number of
weaknesses (not least its failure to recognise labor
organization, and also the methodological constraints imposed
through the aggregation of eight cases selected on the grounds
that they grew fast).

The more effective critiques of the Bank in the past have tried to
mobilize congressional voices around some environmental or human
rights violation of the Bank. Here we have a report which seeks
to impose a modified economic policy orthodoxy on the majority of
the world. That is less easily made into Congressional speeches than a dam
destroying rain forests or a set of irrigation projects enriching
landlords.

And this modified orthodoxy is less damaging than structural adjustment
(though it demands fiscal rectitude, liberalized markets, small
states and macro stability) because
it wants growth with equity and recognizes a wider range of
justifications for state intervention. A critical position
perhaps should not be a simple opposition because the report
represents this sort of advance on the austerity programs
of the 1980s.

Ben Crow
Food Research Inst
Stanford U.