Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Economists speak out on the issues behind the World Trade Organization summit and the street protests.
Dec 2, 1999 | Accounts of the weeklong World Trade Organization conference in Seattle have thus far been dominated by the raucous events on the streets of Seattle, where protesters determined to disrupt the summit have thwarted the scheduled talks about world trade by delegates from 135 nations.
The issues at stake in the conference are numerous and complex; they pit the interests of middle-class American steelworkers against the desperately poor in the Third World, the cost of food on shelves in the United States and Western Europe against the future of many endangered species. The lineup of complaints by the alliance of groups protesting the WTO is equally complex; indeed, they have created an interesting coalition of environmentalists, labor unions and a rainbow of public interest groups.
Salon News spoke to four economic experts to clarify the issues at stake at the conference -- both in the official proceedings and on the streets. On the one hand, there are the issues on the WTO's table, and the conflicts the protests highlight: The future of global economy and its impact on national sovereignty, workers' rights and the environment. On the other, there is the efficacy of the opposition's tactics: Will the protest actually influence the WTO? And what about the violent tactics employed by the most radical of the groups in the streets of Seattle?
Peter Leyden is the co-author of "The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity" and director of the Long Boom Project.
The way the economy is rapidly globalizing is very disruptive to a lot of people. But in the long run, the globalizing of the economy is very positive for a lot of the developing regions and a lot of the marginalized peoples that have not been partaking in the economic booms of the 20th century. This kind of growth is something to be enhanced rather than thwarted. Some people are looking at the developments in a very limited vision of where the actual trajectory of this development is going.
The feelings and the values of the groups that are protesting are totally legitimate. But I see those values being realized in a very different way than the way people think [they're] going to be realized.
The way to actually deal with the pervasive environmental problems on the planet is to accelerate the economic growth, to transition more quickly to new technologies which are much more clean and much more benign on the environment, rather than kind of choking up the process of globalization and keeping these regional or national economies.
For example, if you do limit the trade and interactions between nations, you would have countries like China and India, which have 70 percent of their energy needs rooted in coal, probably the dirtiest energy source on the planet. If you don't accelerate the technology transfer so they can transition to the new generation of technologies that the developed nations like the U.S. already enjoy, you're actually going to damage the environment more severely in the long run.
Rapid global integration of the economy and rapid technology transfer across the world is the solution to the environmental problems -- it is not causing the problem. To stop that process in its tracks now is in fact the exact opposite [of the] thing you want to be doing.
If you take the labor concerns, you have got to understand this in the big picture perspective. For example, a steel manufacturer in the U.S. is all worked up because he thinks somebody producing steel across the world is going to take his job away. Well, frankly, that may be true. His kind of job could be done better and cheaper in another part of the world. And from that lone steelworker's perspective, that could be terrifying.
But from the perspective of the American economy, we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years. We have sectors of the economy that are just screaming for labor and screaming for people to transition into those sectors. Of all the countries in the world right now, this country is the last one that needs to protect any sector of the economy. We could cede the entire global steel industry to developing Asian countries and it wouldn't seriously affect the American economy.
I'm not going to completely defend the World Trade Organization as an organization, in terms of policy decisions or the bureaucrats who run it. There is a legitimate concern about having more people at the table, that should be a democratic process, an open process and a decentralized process.
That said, our technological infrastructure has already gone global. The entire economy is rapidly globalizing. Technology and the economy are now operating at this global scale. The thing that has to happen in the next 10 to 20 years is that we have to see forms of governance evolve to deal with the nature of that globalized technology and economy.
It's in everybody's interest to find a way that that works best, a form of global governance, or regulation, that can deal with the nature of this new, very potent, powerful global economy, one which doesn't really fit, in this 20th century way that we regulate it, within national borders.
When people say, We don't want a global organization that's up to the task of working at that level, they're totally shooting themselves in the foot. In fact, it's impossible for national governments to deal with this creature, this global economy.
In other words, if you really were for the people's perspective in this, if you wanted the average person to have some kind of leverage in what's going to happening in the future here, you would be encouraging global organizations that are up to the task of wrestling with and structuring this global economy in ways that work for human beings and societies, rather than just for corporations.
To dismantle the WTO is just ludicrous -- it's about the only thing we have that's even halfway up to the task. It's a very recent organization, which is good. The IMF and the World Bank are trying to restructure or reformulate after they were created 50 years ago for an economy that was international, not global.
Although [the WTO] is far from perfect, in general it's the right direction. We have to find ways to make it more democratic. We need to find other organizations to go beyond this that can help to craft this global society.
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