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The South Centre Executive Director, Martin Khor, presented a statement to the UN General Assembly on 25 March, detailing the effects of the economic crisis on developing countries and making proposals for changes to the international finnacial and economic order.
This Issue of the South Bulletin focuses on the primacy of health and production over trade and finance. Prioritising trade over over industry, finance over production, and health over intellectual property rights has been one of the most flawed logic of the neoliberal globalisation paradigm. The Editorial by Dr. Yash Tandon, Executive Director of the South Centre is on "Putting Production over Trade and Finance". Other articles and commentaries appearing in this Issue include, Five Steps to Overcoming Global Financial Crisis by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Primacy of Health over Trade and IP Enforcement by Brazilian Ambassador Maria Nazareth Farani Azevedo, Reflections on the Poznan Climate Conference by Mukul Sanwal, Bank of the South: Progress and challenges by Isabel Ortiz and Oscar Ugarteche and ASEAN Towards A Single Market: Lessons for other regions by Tulus Tambunan. The Op-Ed is by Norman Girvan on "Cuba: The debt is unpayable".
South Centre Analytical Note - July 2002 SUMMARY (excerpt)This paper provides a general background to the issues of Trade, Debt, and Finance, and what role they may have in future World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations envisioned through the Working Group on Trade, Debt, and Finance (WGTDF). Its aim is to assist developing countries in effective participation in the work programme of the WGTDF, by underscoring the main issues and objectives, and offering suggestions for future work. It considers the context of the interrelationship of these three issues, noting the condition of the world economic system as run by the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF and World Bank) and the WTO. Since a Northern, neoliberal economic perspective permeates these institutions, developed country interests continue to take centre stage in the negotiating and decision-making processes. It is these interests which set the agenda on development and the relationship between trade, debt, and finance issues. Despite the inherent flaws in these bodies, efforts to reform policies and institutions recently have been unsuccessful. An example is the UN Conference on Financing for Development (FfD) held in Monterrey earlier this year. The paper then proceeds to examine how these institutional and systemic flaws are reflected in global trade and finance, as well as through the burden of debt faced by developing countries. Trade issues include the nearly acrossthe- board dependence on the export of primary commodities. This is largely responsible for the vulnerability of developing countries’ economies to price swings (albeit generally on a downward trend) and their continued existence at the bottom (if even included) of any chains of production, and subsequently, for their poor trade performance. Additional trade issues include the persistence in usage of tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade by developed countries. |