The History of Development by Gilbert Rist

Author:Gilbert Rist
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781786997579
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK (Minor Textbooks)
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fourth, it must be recognized that, over and above these conjunctural phenomena, the NIEO rested entirely upon a form of question-begging that meant it could never be implemented. The system dreamt up by the General Assembly involved, mutatis mutandis, applying to the international economic system a series of redistributive mechanisms tried and tested in the social-democratic countries. For this to have actually functioned, it would have had to have been not an international but a genuinely global (or supranational) system, with coercive powers to organize markets, to distribute profits and to make wealth more equal. It was a utopian vision – because the various states, in competition with one another to gather the spoils of growth, pursued nothing but their own national interest. The ‘new order’, then, merely adjusted the rules of the old order to benefit actors who had appeared quite recently on the international arena. The guiding themes of enrichment and profit remained the same.

The NIEO appears in this light as the last avatar of the dominant economics. For it attached greatest weight to increases in production, while the new situation arising from the petrodollar reserves showed the crucial importance of financial flows for the economic system. It was a question not just of the relative importance given to various phenomena but of a major contradiction. For States can take the steps they think necessary to control output volumes and the amount of money (cash and notes) circulating on their territory, just as they can organize commodity trading at an international level, but they have no hold over the non-commodity money that banks can create at will by means of credit. Within the international setting in which they operate, States therefore seek arrangements to divide out the forms of wealth they can aspire to control, but the crux of the situation escapes them, as it is now financial flows which determine the real opportunities for profit.45 In the sphere of bankers, hunter-gatherer methods do not get you very far.

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