I am also in favor of reforms that improve the playing field for future efforts, like increasing transparency at the IMF and World Bank boards. As I noted in my paper on the issue of user fees in the health sector in Tanzania, we passed a law saying that the U.S. had to oppose such fees. When the PRSP for Tanzania came to the World Bank board, the meeting was held in secret - as always - and there were no published minutes - as always - so there was no way for members of the public or Congress to directly know if U.S. Treasury was complying with the Congressional mandate. (We obtained a leaked copy of the minutes of the World Bank board meeting indicating that staff had mentioned the issue, noting the opposition of NGOs, but there was no record of any government opposition or even discussion.)
And I am also in favor of anything increasing the level of open conflict at the World Bank board, because that increases the level of transparency. So I think that further conflict over the Presidency could be useful, even though we all know they can find a nonwhite person from outside the United States to implement the same policies.
On the issue of microcredit, I concede that it's murky and contested. But while it seems to me obvious that it's not a panacea, and is no substitute for an aggressive national economic development strategy, it's not obvious to me that it shouldn't be part of the mix. It's part of the mix in Venezuela, which gives me some pause about dismissing it completely.
In "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the Irish documentary about the coup in Venezuela, there's a scene where Chavez is asking his ministers about an agricultural development program. "Are there microcredits?" Chavez asks, clearly indicating that Chavez thinks this is an important component.
I was in Venezuela in December on a delegation organized by the Venezuela Information Office. We met with some folks from the co-op movement. They indicated that there was a "microcredit" component to one of the government's key employment programs. The state offers vocational training. People who successfully complete the program are offered government financing to start an enterprise. The catch is that you have to form a coop. So, if you are training to be a hairdresser, you might try to team up with someone else in the training program who is also training to be a hairdresser. Kind of like speed-dating.
Venezuela could be wrong, of course. I'm just suggesting that perhaps we ought to distinguish between dismissing microcredit as a development panacea, where I agree, and dismissing it as potentially a useful part of the mix, where I am more agnostic.
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:28:44 +0700
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Announcing Muhammad Yunus' Candidacy to Head the World Bank
> Robert Naiman wrote:
> > suppose you could reallocate all the money from
> > education and health sector and water privatization and building large
> > dams to microcredit. wouldn't that be a good thing?
> >
>
> Absolutely not, comrade. Why shackle a Third World country with a forex
> loan when the microcredit is in local currency? Who gets the hard
> currency that goes into the central bank (answer: local waBenzis to
> finance luxury imports); who pays back the loan in - scarce and
> expensive - hard currency when microcredit activity generates few or no
> exports (answer: the society and environment).
>
> > In the meantime, however, the World Bank still has a lot of
> > power, particularly in the smaller low-income countries, and so it's
> > worth fighting over.
> >
>
> Given the forex constraint noted above, and that every attempt by
> left-liberals to go inside the WB - Carolyn Moser, Herman Daly, John
> Clarke, Joe Stiglitz - was a horrible disaster, don't you mean 'fighting
> against'?
>
> Hey what happened to that eloquent advocate of *defunding* and
> decommissioning the WB I used to know, comrade Robert?!