World Bank memos

Enzo Michelangeli em at who.net
Wed Dec 2 16:18:21 PST 1998


What about letting people choose what they prefer? Six million Chinese have moved to Hong Kong from PRC, and many more from the pristine, unpolluted, arcadic, socialist countryside to the "dark satanic mills" of Guangdong. Are they all crazy? No, Henry: they are rational individuals who, like their peers in other lands and other times, know very well where their best interest lies.

Enzo

-----Original Message----- From: Henry C.K. Liu <hliu at mindspring.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Thursday, December 03, 1998 1:22 AM Subject: Re: World Bank memos


>Brad Delong:
>
>Its not all that hard to figure out.
>Take Hong Kong and the Pearl River delta, the environmental impact on
public health and life expectancy, not even
>counting "quality of life" cannot be compensated by the increase in "cash
wealth" of the population. Even if HK and
>China were to spend their entire combined foreign trade surpluses on the
restoring the damaged environment, they cannot
>bring it back to pre-1970 levels, not to mention losses in fisheries and
agricultural production due to environmental
>damage.
>The so-called emerging economies or NICs can apply a simple Pareto Optimum
test to evaluate policies and projects. And
>if that should slow down "development", so be it. The difference between
dying from hunger and dying from lung cancer
>is academic.
>Pollution for hunger is a Western strategy to shift a politically explosive
condition (hunger leads to riots) to a
>politically benign condition (pollution is debated in universities). It is
a more sophisticated version of the
>British's selling opium to 18th century China. The post-war international
division of labor has degenerated into the
>export of pollution and sub-standard working conditions from the developed
economies. And it has to stop.
>
>By the way, Larry Summers has as little credibility in Asia as he does in
Congress.
>
>Henry C.K. Liu
>
>
>Brad De Long wrote:
>
>> >G'day Brad,
>> >
>> >You write:
>> >
>> >>> Go easy on Larry. Remember the papers that he and I wrote late in the
1980s
>> >>> supporting a Tobin Tax...
>> >
>> >I risk going over old terrain here because I've had to resort to
trashing
>> >unread posts of late. Are we talking Larry Summers?
>> >
>> >That Larry is, it seems to me, a slightly more forthright and honest pig
>> >than the pigs Patrick lists. He knows well enough that of which he's
part.
>> >As he did in the case of his oh-so-forthright-and-honest argument for
>> >poisoning people in the third world. How did that bit of forthright
>> >honesty go again? 'They're all gonna die soon anyway, so it won't
hurt',
>> >wasn't it?
>>
>> It wasn't, actually...
>>
>> In a lot of manufacturing industries, "dirty" production processes are a
>> lot cheaper than "clean" ones. Since labor productivity in many
developing
>> economies is still very low, a demand that developing countries adopt
>> first-world standards of pollution control may be a demand that they not
>> industrialize--that they stay very poor.
>>
>> It's not clear what the right policy is. It is clear that taking
expensive
>> steps to reduce the risk of prostate cancer (the reference in your last
>> sentence) which kills you a long time from now when you are old should
not
>> be a high priority as long as you still have amoebic dysentery and
cholera
>> in your water. And to the extent that industrializing faster in a
>> cheap-and-dirty way gets your government the resources to clean up the
>> water, industrializing faster is a good thing.
>>
>> Things are complicated--and this is why it is hard to figure out what the
>> right thing to do is--by the fact that the beneficiaries from
>> cheap-and-dirty forms of industrialization (the bosses of manufacturing
>> firms, and those workers employed in them who aren't whomped by
>> pollution-related diseases) are different from those who suffer from
>> pollution (children who get lung diseases, and nearby residents poisoned
by
>> heavy metals). Will the profits from cheap-and-dirty industrialization go
>> to cleaning up the public water supply? Or will they go to Swiss bank
>> accounts?
>>
>> As I understand the context of Lant Pritchett's memo, it was written in
an
>> internal World Bank debate with a whole bunch of guys who were ducking
this
>> whole set of issues, and simply saying that no factory should be built
>> anywhere in the world that does not use best-world-practice emissions
>> control methods--and thus had gone overboard on the "Malthusian" side:
>> arguing (implicitly at least) that the best policy is to keep people in
>> developing economiespoor so they won't pollute very much...
>>
>> Brad DeLong
>
>



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