Monday, Feb 24, 2003
Monday, Feb 24, 2003 |
| Front Page | ||
|
News:
Front Page |
National |
Southern States |
Other States |
International |
Opinion |
Business |
Sport |
Miscellaneous |
Advts: Classifieds | Employment | Obituary | Front Page
By Amit Baruah
Addressing the NAM Business Forum on South-South Cooperation, he called for the "reform and reorientation" of globalisation as part of the effort to remake the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) by articulating a strong developmental agenda. He spoke of the volatility of capital flows and the need for increasing resource flows to poor countries through "affirmative action" if necessary. He proposed that capital flows be regulated by an "international levy". A token tax of a quarter of a per cent could generate annual revenues of some $300 billion and could form the corpus of a Global Poverty Alleviation Fund. Describing the NAM journey as one of "huge missed opportunities", he said further opportunities should, however, not be missed by this 116-nation organisation. On the relevance of NAM, he said its political agenda had changed with the end of the Cold War. Globalisation had thrown up both challenges and opportunities for developing countries. "Our unrealised goals of development and our shared vision for a peaceful tomorrow should unite us even more conclusively in the era of globalisation than the political goals of the Cold War era." Mr. Vajpayee said 10 million people had been annually joining the ranks of the world's poor in the last decade. A quarter of the world's population, he stressed, lived below the poverty line — a billion people surviving on less than a dollar a day. He was firm that strengthening regional economic cooperation offered a time-tested framework for rapid and mutually beneficial economic growth. "In our scramble for the increasingly saturated markets of the advanced countries, we ignore the growth possibilities of South-South trade and investment linkages." "Today, Malaysian firms are building highways in India and Indian companies are building railway projects in Malaysia. Such linkages can be multiplied literally a hundred fold in the areas of energy security, food security, infrastructure development, tourism, entertainment and the media." Calling for the exchange of information on success stories such as Bangladesh's micro-credit institutions, he said, "In the jargon of today, most of us are fully wired. Yet we do not seem to be connected to each other... We do not exchange information with countries around us on the more basic realities." Referring to the end of statist models of economic growth, Mr. Vajpayee said Malaysia was a success story in private enterprise being supported by a facilitatory role from the Government. "In India, too, economic liberalisation has yielded positive results. Within the last decade, nearly 15 per cent of our population has been lifted above the poverty line — and that means 150 million people." However, one could not be blind to the fact that globalisation had not rewarded most developing countries. The 116 nations of NAM, representing two-thirds of the world's population, still contributed barely 20 per cent of the globe's GDP, he pointed out. "Their economic growth was slower in the Nineties than in the Seventies. In most developing countries, per capita incomes have been falling, unemployment is rising and income disparities are widening.'' He added that for years, NAM had been arguing the merits and demerits of a permanent Secretariat, with competing claims for its location and disagreements on the scope of its activities. "With one website on the Internet — or a network of such websites — we can virtually perform many functions of a NAM Secretariat."
Printer friendly
page
News:
Front Page |
National |
Southern States |
Other States |
International |
Opinion |
Business |
Sport |
Miscellaneous |
|
|
|
The Hindu Group: Home | About Us | Copyright | Archives | Contacts | Subscription Group Sites: The Hindu | Business Line | The Sportstar | Frontline | Home |
Copyright © 2003, The
Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of
this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of
The Hindu
|
