West's free-market (invite multinat'l corp's in to produce domestically)

[papau]

West's free-market agenda is unlikely to compensate losers

Jonathan Michie
Monday November 24, 2003 The Guardian

<snip>We live in a globalised world. A global war on terror against an international axis of evil. Call centres for Britain's train timetables relocated to India....The poorer countries, whose industries and firms cannot survive such competition, will be left with no alternative but to import goods from the advanced economies - or else invite multinational corporations into their countries to produce domestically.

...In the world of textbook neoclassical economics, the freemarket outcome will maximise economic welfare...(but)the attempts to change reality to fit (this) model are destructive of the sort of social, political and economic institutions which historically have actually created economic growth and social progress.

<snip>The fact that the economy is becoming increasingly internationalised does not dictate the form that this process takes. The free-market, laissez-faire agenda is one being pursued by those who benefit from such a deregulated, winner-take-all environment. It is not the only choice. And, for the majority of the world's population, it is an inappropriate one.

· Jonathan Michie is Sainsbury professor of management at Birkbeck College
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7369,1091943,00.html