Abstract
Drawing on ethnography of the World Bank’s private sector development program, this paper explores the ways in which discussions of export competitiveness emerged in the past decade or so and how they interacted with larger discourses on solidarity and development. The immediate context within which this idea emerged was that of the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) which had maintained that the public regulation of the private economy compromises on industrial productivity (and by extension distributive social justice). But it would be naïve to think that alternative ideologies have not tried to insert themselves within the Bank’s neoliberal discourse on development. If anything, discursive narratives suggest that the very notion of export competitiveness initially worked to justify the role of the state in regulating and incubating the private sector in developing countries even if these attempts became disembedded from their local contexts in the long run. This paper contextualizes this specific encounter on export competitiveness within the broader discourse of development and economic anthropology to examine the discursive politics of policy and knowledge in the global aid industry.
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Notes
See Williamson (1990) for a list of policy conditionalities imposed on the borrowing governments binding them to open up their economies for foreign investment and international trade.
The economic crises in question include, among others, the Asian financial crisis of 1998, the Anglo-American crisis of 2008, and the Greek crisis about its membership of the European Union in 2015.
Jim Y. Kim was nominated by the Obama administration into the position of the President of the World Bank in July 2012 upon completion of the term of the outgoing President Robert Zoellick. While Zoellick was a former US trade representative who had fiercely negotiated the terms of trade for American industries in China, Kim is a former medical anthropologist and a liberal academic earlier known for his criticism of excessive emphasis on economic growth for broader development (Kim et al. 2002).
The seven geographic regions under which the Bank programs were divided in were, namely, Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia, South Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central America, and sub-Saharan Africa.
The five thematic units under which the Bank programs were organized under could be listed as Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM), Public Sector Reform and Governance, Finance and Private Sector Development (FPD), Sustainable, Rural and Infrastructure Development (SD), Human Development (HD), and Development Economics (DEC).
The 14 units listed under its Global Practices are agriculture, education, energy and extractives, environment and natural resources, finance and markets, governance, health and nutrition and population, macroeconomics and fiscal management, poverty, social protection and labor, social/urban/rural and resilience, trade and competitiveness, water, and transport and information/communication technologies.
The Growth Commission consisted, among others, of the former Prime Minister of Korea, the former and sitting Finance Ministers from India, Turkey, Nigeria and South Africa, and two Nobel Laureate economists Robert Solow and Michael Spence. The Commission worked for two years.
“Stagflation” denotes a slow economic growth scenario complicated by an unusual combination of high inflation and high unemployment, thus posing the policy dilemma as to whether to curb one or the other since addressing one problem would force deterioration of the other.
See Ferguson (2005) for a discussion on how developmental aspirations and assurances—that third world countries can achieve the prosperity enjoyed by the first world if they made efforts—have now been lost thus turning the ranking of development from a “telos” to a “status.”
Harriss’s (2002) argument that Putnam’s “depoliticized” narrative which puts neighborhood mingling at the heart of all problem-solving while ignoring more complex elements should be read with Ferguson’s scathing criticism that aid agencies’ disregard for local politics in developing countries comes from a misplaced belief that their own interventions are free from the broader rules of the game.
Based on an address in which one of the chief economists of the Bank introduced Douglass North for his public lecture within the Bank in 2004.
Even if the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz went on to write a preface to a new (2001) edition to Polanyi’s (1944) “The Great Transformation” calling on the developmental community to be guided by concerns of global social justice, this advice went largely unheeded among his colleagues at the World Bank. Stiglitz himself unceremoniously resigned from his job as the Chief Economist of the World Bank owing to the disagreement with the Bank’s dominant narrative on economic development.
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Shakya, M. An anthropological reading of the policies of international development: export competitiveness as a conjunctural case study. Dialect Anthropol 41, 113–128 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9451-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9451-z