Globalisation and Ideology in Britain by Craig Berry

Author:Craig Berry [Berry, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781701850
Google: YAqPAQAACAAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2011-01-15T04:02:37+00:00

Privatisation and the role of the state

Privatisation is less directly related to the IFSL’s main policy agenda. However, for IFSL, the growth of the global financial services industry would require some privatisation by the governments of developing countries; it therefore lobbied national- and supranational-level authorities to this end. Nevertheless, privatisation in general was a surprisingly prominent aspect of IFSL’s perspective. IFSL’s general understanding of privatisation and its value is discussed here in order to provide insight into the organisation’s view of the state. It is in this regard that IFSL can be associated with a neoliberal perspective. Privatisation was associated with a range of direct and indirect benefits (for developed and developing countries), chiefly that privatised companies are run more efficiently due to competitive pressures, therefore making more profit and ultimately paying more tax (again this is not empirically verified). Privatisation was also said to enable capital market development, through its attractiveness to foreign investors (IFSL, 2003a, 2003b).

At the root of these supposed benefits were assumptions about the inherent utility of the private sector, in contrast to state intervention. On a research paper on public–private partnership (PPP), IFSL argued that

PPP allows each partner to concentrate on activities that best suit their respective skills. For the public sector the key skill is to procure services that are consistent with long-term policy priorities, while for the private sector the key skill is to deliver those services at the most efficient costs. (2003b: 4)

The terminology in use here, particularly the concept of ‘skills’, is quite odd, yet it achieves the obvious intent of clearly demarcating the proper functions of state and market. Despite this, one IFSL official interviewed argued explicitly that IFSL does not lobby on privatisation, stating that ‘IFSL is not in the business of telling foreign governments what to do... But we do seek to make the intellectual argument for a free and open economy, of which privatisation is a part.’ The statement is again somewhat duplicitous, given that some privatisation measures are necessitated by GATS, which IFSL seeks to expand (without SDT). Yet this is not an unexpected aspect of any political discourse. The main conclusion drawn here is that, for IFSL, that openness to international or transnational economic processes and actors was significantly entwined with IFSL’s understanding of economic freedom. Privatisation was seen as key to openness. This represents a valorisation of private sector organisations that we can associate with neoliberalism. However, the association of openness with global economic integration is not necessarily, in a logical sense, derived from neoliberal ideology. The fact that IFSL’s position on the state is linked so closely to its ‘outward-orientation’ is suggestive of broader intellectual horizons.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.