Comrade, if you have to ask, you won't understand the answer.
>> "The $ prices of your exports have crashed..."
> But the rand prices have skyrocketed with the epidemic devaluation of
local
> currencies in the 3rd world.
So have the prices of imported Caterpillars and mining equipment. And if you're talking SA, all the additional forex is leaching out to the London hqs of the major mining exporters, since early 2000 (which is the main reason the rand crashed in half... which is being felt here my spikes in inflation and interest rates, so that makes my point even stronger)...
> "...while trade lib has crashed your local capacity to
> import-substitute,..."
> Meaning that imports from countries whose currencies you can barely pay
for
> are still super-competitive in local markets. How so?
No, the typical "phasing" of structural adjustment is to get rid of tariffs while the currencies were still relatively high, leading to massive deindustrialisation of a sort that cannot just be reversed when import prices soar as currencies crash. We're talking pretty permanent damage to industrial sectors (like Zimbabwe's) that were amongst the fifth most powerful (in relation to GDP) in the world.
>> "your import bill keeps soaring..."
> Again, why, when foreign exchange is such a nightmare?
Because power relations are such that the greedhead local elites can always go to the black market and pay absurd amounts for forex to bring in relatively tariff-free luxury goods (in SA there's no black market -- they just use up massive resources doing so legally).
>> "and includes conspicuous-consumption goodies enjoyed by a tiny fraction
of
>> elites and expat foreign-aid staff (and NGO leaders),..."
> So what?
Hey whose side are you on?
>> "and today you've got "responsible" international allies like Oxfam
trying
>> to teach you that your poor people can rise up if only the int'l trading
>> system was a bit more fair-"
> Doesn't the focus on international trade come in part from the fact that
> internal economic development in the 3rd world has proven more than
elusive
> despite years and years of socially-conscious advice?
> What do you think of
> the approach championed by Hernando de Soto and his Institute for Liberty
> and Democracy?
The commodification of everything, isn't it? If you want the classic critique of land/housing markets and credit collateralisation, try David Harvey's 1973 book, Social Justice and the City. What's new in de Soto, from old-timey unworkable modernisation theory? Virtually no attempts to commodify and collateralise the housing and land of the urban and rural poor worked in colonial Zimbabwe (1950s), especially, and in the rest of Southern Africa from the 1960s (the colonial/apartheid states called it "community development") and especially the late 1980s with all manner of variants of microneoliberalism such as microfinance.
> Isn't there the Japan, Korea, Taiwan model?
Policy-wise, I'd go for the massive land reform in the latter two; nationalisation of the banks in SK; vigorous state industrial policy, including keeping TNCs out in all three... but not much more than that. Check Marty Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkette's book on East Asia published by St Martins in 2000.
> Isn't the IMF
> (whatever one thinks of their methods) just as focused on preserving the
> value of local currencies as the protectionists are?
No, their main focus has been financial liberalisation these past ten years, plus high real interest rates to slow it a bit.
> Isn't the value of
> local currencies essential? Isn't autarky a goal so unrealistic as to be
> unreasonable?
Depends on what terms.
> If autarky is unrealistic, mustn't local currency hold value
> in international trade?
Depends entirely on what one does with the local social surplus.
>> "-and the likes of Keynes and Daly get painted as "extremists."
> Obviously the "extremist" label is silly, but can we say that Keynes may
be
> significantly outdated?
Or you can say that the Washington Consensus is the outdated Treasury View.
> ...
> Okay, but then you have as well to make the argument that cheap cash crops
> produced by 1st world farmers (subsidized, but also efficient) are worse
for
> the people in the favellas and the shantytowns than more expensive cash
> crops produced by local subsistence farmers (inefficient).
Check Michael Perelman's work on this. Part of that argument also relates to "inefficient" biodiverse grain stocks and other plant life which is being destroyed by invasion of the TNC food marketers.
>> "Daly's 1996 departure speech from the World Bank, where as environmental
>> economist he was repeatedly frustrated, concluded optimistically, "Take
it
>> as a prediction--ten years from now the buzz words and hot concepts will
>> be`renationalization of capital' and the `community rooting of capital
for
>> the development of national and local economies.'"
>> I think "re-nationalization of capital" and "community rooting of
capital"
>> are not the same thing at all.
Right, but why not both?
> For development to progress, we have to know
> what local capitals are worth and that means monetizing them somehow,
> whether we call it "monetizing" or not.
Or we take a more sceptical view of the way that markets value "progress" and try to demonitise and decommodify life. We've been doing that lots with Aids drugs here, trying to save millions of lives. Join us?
>> "These are, even to my socialist ears, more sensible sentiments than
Oxfam's
>> utopian attempts to reform globalization through, in part, expanding the
>> reach of multinational trading capital. Oxfam fails to recognise not
only
>> the merits of self-reliance, but also that enormous amount of
>> socio-environmental damage is done by virtue of the transport, energy,
>> packaging, marketing, waste and currency fluctuations associated with
>> unnecessary cross-border trade of goods and services in the name of an
>> alleged "comparative advantage," which in any case is mainly invented or
>> artificial."
> I think your argument against "transport, energy, packaging, marketing" is
> anti-development.
Anti-capitalist and anti-underdevelopment, yes.
> You can't relegate people to subsistence farming.
Huh?
> Interdependence is always superior to "self-reliance".
Keynes called for globalisation of people, not of capital. I'm with him.
> I agree that there
> is a great deal that is artificial in trade, particularly in the matter of
> currency, but trade works for the first world, why shouldn't it work for
the
> third world?
The law of combined and uneven development.
Sorry to be brief, gotta go...