Foreign aid

[Charles Jannuzi]

>>Subject: Re: Foreign aid

On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Ulhas Joglekar wrote:

> What is so radical about a Japanese style 
Vietnamese postal savings > system?

It's quite socialistic, actually -- a state-owned
 bank, which encourages local savings and village
accumulation, while  leveraging funds for
national infrastructure projects. Absolutely 
scandalous to the neolibs, of course, whose
notion of village development  begins and ends
with microcredit -- the ideology of "let them eat
 credit cards".

- -- Dennis<<

The postal financial system in Japan extends into
both savings and insurance products, and Dennis's
description does capture where the money goes.
Incidentally, both the savings and insurance ran
nice profits in the last period reported.

The Ministry of Finance, being the
spokes-ministry of Japan's city, trust and credit
banks, is against the postal savings and
insurance. The systems are run under the Ministry
of Posts and Telecommunications (this has
actually been reorganized into a ministry with a
longer name designed to dilute the power of the
bureaucrats Koizumi made a career of bashing).

 Koizumi made his 'reputation' as an appointed
head of the posts ministry where he proceeded to
fight every day with all the bureaucrats. Both he
and Tanaka (the now fired Minister of Foreign
Affairs) never ever showed an ability to work
with bureaucrats, though Koizumi shows some
closeness now to the Ministry of Finance (in my
opinion, the worst of all ministries here and one
that should be put completely out of business). 

Another system that helped in the development of
Japan was the Japan Agriculture. It started out
as wholesale and retail cooperatives and as
credit unions (more or less). Collectively, the
JA credit unions--now referred to as JA Bank (not
ginko, which is Japanese for bank, but 'banku',
which is an English loan word meaning, I guess,
'a new kind of bank'). Such efforts were more
bottom-up coops, but they came to have strong
ties with the Ministry of Agricultural, Forestry
and Fisheries. It might be argued that indeed in
many areas the JAs were more important. They took
in money and loaned it out directly to the local
communities, so you might get a loan at the same
JA you had your life savings and bought your
insurance. 

In the area of food retail they became quite
corporate in nature. This lead to a turning away
from them, with farmers and consumers forming new
prefectural level coops for agriculture. Also,
CGC supermarkets which are all over the place
also started out as coops.

CJ     


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better
http://health.yahoo.com