Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 17:27:23 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Query & Comment on East Asia


G'day Thaxists,

>From this week's *Economist*, two contrasting viewpoints:

  + The WORLD ECONOMY is set fair for steady expansion of about 4.5% a year
    over the next five years, according to predictions from the IMF in its
    annual World Economic Outlook. It praised central banks for keeping
    inflation under control. Two surprises: the IMF raised its forecast for
    growth in America this year and next strongly upwards; but in Japan,
    growth in 1997 is predicted at half the IMF's forecast of a year
    earlier and nearly a percentage point down in 1998.


  + A report from a United Nations agency took a different tack, arguing
    that the global economy was growing too slowly to create enough jobs to
    reduce unemployment in industrial countries or to eliminate poverty in
    less developed ones. The UNCTAD study on GLOBALISATION said that the
    differences in income per head between the seven richest and seven
    poorest countries has nearly doubled, from 20 times in 1965 to 39 times
    in 1995.

Of course, nothing in the UN development agency stance contradicts anything
in the IMF report.  I'd be interested in the 'standard of living' in the
seven poorest countries, though.  I don't even know who they are (but I'll
bet most are in Africa).  But have conditions improved in absolute terms in
these countries?  Given my 'dependencia' tendencies, I expect not.  I heard
something a year or two back about the IMF rescheduling interest
repayments, but I'm given to believe this hasn't been implemented.  Which
means 'development' is still a process the balance of which involves
southern value going north.

  + One week after an American official complained that Japan was doing too
    little to boost domestic demand, JAPANESE TRADE STATISTICS showed that
    the country's trade surplus rose for the fifth month running. The
    August figure showed a 114% rise from a year earlier to Yen742 billion (
    $6.3 billion).

Given the poor growth projections (above), Japan might be counting on the
following:

  + To help its attempts to become a member of the World Trade Organisation,
    CHINA is cutting tariff rates by an average of six percentage points,
    from 23% to 17%, on nearly 5,000 items.

If the word on Chinese privatisation policy is right (a staggering figure
of 100 million consequentially unemployed has been bandied about), might we
not expect some trouble in China?  Everybody points to China's (relative -
esp. to SU) ethnic homogeneity as a mitigating factor here, but it occurs
to me that 100 million lifelong socialists suddenly deprived of income and
work would occasion some draconian social policy (perhaps courtesy of the
'People's Army'?), wide open doors to foreign investment capital in search
of rapid compensatory employment, and, I suspect, some sort of attempt at
regional development policy too (China ain't Shanghai - and I can't see
foreign investment proliferating beyond that south-eastern zone).

This is the stuff of civil war to the ignorant bystander (probably
potentially the most significant discord between emerging forces and
residual relations of production in the world today).  And the implications
go well beyond China's borders, no?  Has the IMF factored into its happy
global forecasts a billion extra consumers and cut-price producers?

I can only explain such optimism in terms of a decade of uninterrupted
triumphalism. But then I'd never really thought about this region before
Denis got us on to it.

Please enlighten me.

Cheers,
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

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'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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