As noted earlier, onerous austerity measures to force the public to pay the largely fraudulent external debt is not new. Benignly calling such oppressive measures "Structural Adjustment Programs," the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have for decades imposed them on many less developed countries to collect debt on behalf of international financial titans.
To "help" the indebted nations craft debt-servicing arrangements with external creditors, the IMF imposed severe conditions on the way they managed their economies--just as it is now imposing (in collaboration with the European and American bankers) those austerity policies on the debtor nations in Europe. The primary purpose of such restrictive conditions is to divert or transfer national resources from domestic use to external creditors. These include not only belt-tightening measures to cut social spending and/or raise taxes, but also selling-off public enterprises, national industries, and future tax revenues.
Calling such fire-sale privatization deals "briberization," the ex-World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz revealed (in an interview with the renowned investigative reporter Greg Palast) how finance ministers and other bureaucratic authorities in the debtor countries often carried out the Bank's demand to sell off their electricity, water, transportation and communication companies in return for some apparently irresistible sweetener. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billions off the sale price of national assets [2].
The IMF/World Bank/WTO "structural adjustment programs" also include neoliberal policies of "capital-market liberalization." In theory, capital market deregulation is supposed to lead to the inflow and investment of foreign capital, thereby bringing about industrialization, job creation and economic expansion. In practice, however, financial liberalization often leads to more capital outflow (or capital flight) than inflow. To the extent that there is an inflow of capital it is not so much productive or industrial capital as it is unproductive or speculative capital (also known as "hot money"): massive amounts of capital that is constantly in transit across international borders in pursuit of real estate, currency, or interest rate speculation.
To attract foreign capital to the relatively vulnerable markets of debtor nations, the IMF frequently recommends drastic increases in interest rate. Higher interest rates are, however, both anti-developmental and detrimental to the goal of debt servicing. Higher interest rates tend to destroy property values, divert financial resources away from productive investment, and increase the burden of debt servicing.
For example, in the Philippines, which in 1980 adopted the IMF's Structural Adjustment Program, "Interest payments as a percentage of total government expenditures went from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994. Capital expenditures, on the other hand, plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent." By contrast, "the Philippines' Southeast Asian neighbors ignored the IMF's prescriptions. They limited debt servicing while ramping up government capital expenditures in support of growth. Not surprisingly, they grew by 6 to 10 percent from 1985 to 1995. . .while the Philippines barely grew and gained the reputation of a depressed market that repelled investors" [3].
A major condition of the IMF/World Bank/WTO's "restructuring program" is trade liberalization. Free trade has always been the bible of the economically strong, self-righteously preached to the weak. It enables the strong to use their market power for economic gains, thereby perpetuating an international division of labor in which the technologically advanced countries would specialize in the production and export of high-tech, high-value added products while less developed countries would be condemned to the supply of less- or un-processed products. It is not surprising, then, that such a lop-sided policy of trade liberalization is sometimes called "free trade imperialism."
Taking advantage of the so-called Third World debt crisis, the IMF, World Bank and WTO imposed free trade and other "adjustment programs" on 70 developing countries in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. "Because of this trade liberalization," points out Walden Bello, member of the Philippines House of Representatives and president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, "gains in economic growth and poverty reduction posted by developing countries in the 1960s and 1970s had disappeared by the 1980s and 1990s. In practically all structurally adjusted countries, trade liberalization wiped out huge swathes of industry, and countries enjoying a surplus in agricultural trade became deficit countries." Bello further points out, "The number of poor increased in Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe, the Arab states, and sub-Saharan Africa." By contrast, in China and East Asia, where the neoliberal free trade and other Structural Adjustment Programs were rejected, significant economic development and considerable poverty reduction took place [3].
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