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  #241  
Old Monday, September 26, 2011
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Is `Washington Consensus` still working?


By Shahid Javed Burki
Monday, 26 Sep, 2011


WITH the world teetering on the edge of possibly another economic downturn, following on the one that deeply affected, both developed and developing countries, policymakers have begun to reflect on the pros and cons of globalisation.

Three years ago before the global economy went into a deep recession, what came to be called `globalisation` was all the rage. The term stood for open economies which allowed relatively free flow of trade, capital and information.

A new economic philosophy was structured around this concept.

Called the `Washington Consensus`since its advocates worked in such Washington-based institutions as the World Bank, the IMF and Inter-American Development Bank it laid a detailed prescription for developing economies. Developing countries that approached the Washingtonbased institutions for assistance were persuaded to adopt the approach. Most countries in Latin America and East Asia obliged and initially benefited.

But then came the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s when several countries in the region discovered that the foreign capital that flowed in could also move out and do so quickly.

Recognising the downside to the process of globalisation, some of the East Asian nations became more cautious about economicopenness particularly in terms of capital flows. While placing some judicious controls on capital flows, these nations kept their economies open to trade.

If there were some who doubted the wisdom of totally open economies, they were mostly in the developing world. They believed that most of the benefits of openness accrues to rich countries who, taking advantage of the lowering or totally removing the barriers to trade, harmed the nascent industries in the emerging world.

But experience with open economies brought considerable benefits to the well-managed emerging economies. Since international trade increased much more rapidly than the growth in global product, open economies in Asia benefitted enormously. In a well-known report, the World Bank called them the `miracle economies` as some of them saw rates of growth that were a multiple of those ever recorded in history.

While East Asia was a ready convert to the idea of `globalisation` the South Asians moved much more slowly. The subcontinent had adopted what economists called the `import substitution` approach to development. They were keen on developing domestic enterprises by restricting foreign competition. However, developing industrial and commercial capacities behind high walls of protection meant a great deal of inefficiency. It was only in the early 1990s when the Indians, faced with a serious balance of payments crisis, opened their economy, not so much to outside competition as todomestic enterprise.

The elaborate system of controls that had come to be called the `license raj` was replaced with almost unconstrained role by the private sector. The economy took off.

About the same time, Pakistan also began the process of reducingthe control of the government over industry, commerce and finance.

However, in Pakistan`s case political uncertainty stood in the way of the response of the private sector.

Consequently the economy did not match the Indian experience.

Given this history, can it be saidthat globalisation has brought benefits to the developing world? The economic downturn of 2008-09 exposed the more open economies of East Asia and Latin America to the associated decline in international trade and credit squeeze that were some of its direct consequences.

South Asia in particular India suffered less. Pakistan was also hurt a bit but overall the Great Recession of 2008-09 did not prove to be a major setback for South Asia.

The tepid recovery of the last two years has restored some of the lost activity in the global market place. For instance, world trade in 2011 has recovered to the levels of the pre-crisis boom. At the same time investment flows from rich countries to emerging markets are back to above $1,000 billion. This is still short of the record set in 2007 when as much as $1.2 trillion was provided to the developing world.

While some of the processes associated with globalisation are being restored some serious questions are being raised in the developed world about its consequences. There are debates in both, America and Europe about the impact of globalisation, particularly the way the poorer segments of the society have been affected. Many western analysts believe that the structural change brought about by globalisation is one reason why the recovery in Europe and America has been so slow, that there is a real chance of their economies going back into recession.

Writing in the Financial Times last month, Jeffrey Sachs a highly respected American economistsaid: `Globalisation has raised very serious adjustment challenges for the high-income world, and most high-income countries, notably the US, have failed to meet these challenges.` His reference, of course, was to the fact that the little economic recovery that has taken place since the Great Recession was declared to be officially over more than two years ago, in the first quarter of calendar 2009, has had practically no impact on the job market.

The rate of employment in the United States having dipped for a few months to below nine per cent is up again. There is political clamor for action and some of what is being demanded will hurt the developing world. It will also retard the process of globalisation.

Some of the left-leaning economists are suggesting that the massive restructuring of the global production process that accompanied globalisation has resulted in massive job losses in the West.

According to this line of thinking, manufacturing activities as a result of globalization were relocated from Europe and America to many parts of the developing world. As western entrepreneurs discovered the cost advantages of doing business in the emerging world, they moved not only manufacturing but also a number of other activities to some emerging economies. This is when globalisation began to help South Asia but mostly India.

A number of large American and European corporations, impressed with the quality of the work force available in that country formed formal alliances withthe Indian companies operating in the sectors of information, communication, entertainment, health services and pharmaceuticals.

These are precisely the sectors of the global economy which are likely to grow at a rate considerably higher than the overall increase in world output.

It appears that the opportunities created by globalisation for the emerging world may begin to be constrained as the political pressure increases in the United States in particular but in other developed countries as well to focus on keeping jobs at home. Two days before the start of the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington, the Fund released a report cutting its forecast for global growth. The rate of increase in the aggregate GDP of developed countries is likely to be only 2.2 per cent in 2011 while that of the emerging world will be three times as much, 6.6 per cent.

This sharp difference between the prospects of the two groups of countries is being seen in many political quarters as emerging countries benefitting from the troubles of the developed world. The meaning of this for a country such as Pakistan is clear. It has stayed on the margins of the global economy for several years as most of East Asia and some parts of South Asia India in particular benefitted from globalisation.

The future for it most probably lies in working with other parts of the developing world. Not only will the West have less to offer. It will also be less hospitable for the developing world.

Is `Washington Consensus` still working? | ePaper | DAWN.COM
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Old Monday, October 03, 2011
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Breakdown of the “Grand Bargain” — I


By Shahid Javed Burki
Published: October 3, 2011


More often than not, change that makes history happens slowly, mostly unnoticed. Why it occurs is left to the historians to explain and argue about. Sometimes revolutions bring about change as happened in 18th century America and France and 20th century Russia and China. What we are witnessing now in the Arab world is a revolution. In the series of articles I begin today, and will continue to contribute to this space for weeks to come, I will explore the relevance of what is happening in the Arab world, not only for the countries that are its part, it will profoundly affect the rest of the world as well. And its impact on Pakistan will be significant. Well understood by the policymaking elite, the revolution on the Arab street could change Pakistan’s situation for the better.

The Arab Spring is a movement that has brought the citizenry of the several countries affected by this unfolding drama to the centre stage of politics. If all goes well, those in power will no longer be able to ignore the wishes and aspirations of the people. People will have influence on the making of economic and social policy and policies affecting relations with the outside world. It will not be possible for the leadership in these countries to disregard what the ‘street’ thinks and believes in. Over time ‘the street’ will be replaced by the representatives of the people who will be able to hold the executive branch of the government responsible for the actions it takes. What keeps western leaders awake at night is the fear that they will have to make more than a phone call to persuade the various heads of state to walk their way.

They should also lose some sleep over the fact that by slipping over into the neighbouring regions, the peoples’ movement may further erode the global presence of the West. The Arab Spring will affect not only the entire Middle East and most non-Arab Muslim countries in the area. It is also likely to profoundly impact South Asia. That is likely to happen not only because a third of the South Asian population — half-a-billion out of the total of 1.5 billion people — are Muslims. There will be consequences for different countries in the region for different reasons. The peoples’ revolution would have come to Pakistan if the country had not opted in early 2008 for democratic governance. But it will still come through a different route, one which will take it out of the American orbit in which the country moved for more than half a century into one that has at its center some of the regional powers — Turkey, Egypt, perhaps also Pakistan itself.

The Anna Hazare movement in India has already exposed the shortcomings in the traditional democratic structure in which the elected parliament does not always seem to represent what the electorate really wants. That is why a large number of people, mostly from the expanding middle class, felt that their economic gains in recent years were not matched by any kind of political profit. Troubled by the fact that while their economic advance was the product of hard work and risk-taking enterprise, large fortunes had been made and were being made by misusing the power of the government. In Hazare they found a ‘saint-politician’ they were happy to support. The Indian system may also need some change as it is not working for the people of the less well performing regions of the vast country –they constitute the majority of the Indian population. The income and performance gaps between the states on the west coast compared to those in the country’s east are increasing. Millions of people in the poorer states feel and resent that the tide of ‘rising India’ is passing them by.

Bangladesh, the third largest country in the South Asian mainland, is also struggling to find its political feet. Like other South Asian countries, it has also not been able to institutionalise the process of political transition. Political power if not usurped by military leaders as was in its case and was also the case of Pakistan, tends to flow through dynastic channels. In Pakistan three major political parties are controlled by families. Pakistan Peoples Party is engaged in the process of preparing the third generation after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to take over its leadership. If the current plans succeed, India’s Congress Party will be handing over the reins of management to the fourth generation. In Bangladesh the two mainstream parties are led by the leaders who owe their positions to the members of their families who were once the country’s presidents. The current prime minister has removed one provision in the constitution through an amendment that had previously ensured some order in the transfer of power. The country’s president will no longer be able to let a caretaker administration take the responsibility for holding elections at the appointed time and in way that ensured political fairness.

One of the main lessons of the Arab Spring seems to have been lost on the leadership groups in South Asia, in particular on the families that have governed for so long and without being seriously challenged by political processes. One reason why so many people came out on the streets or assembled in public squares in so many different countries was the frustration with the fact that no political means were available for bringing about regime change. It is no coincidence that the three regimes that fell in less than one year had been in place for decades. The presidents of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had governed for a total of 120 years. Populations frustrated with their performance and seeing no improvements in their own situation chose to rebel rather than continuing to remain passive and tolerant. There were many reasons why the street and the public square succeeded. One of the more important ones was that the established order did not have the support of the world outside the borders of the countries where people desired change. The “grand bargain” between the political elite and the West that had scaffolded the rule by the former finally broke down.

Source: Breakdown of the Grand Bargain
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  #243  
Old Thursday, October 06, 2011
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Creating order out of chaos


By Shahid Javed Burki
Monday, 03 Oct, 2011


THE last time the global community attempted to create a new economic order out of total and utter chaos was in 1944 when the likely victors of the Second World War assembled at a resort, Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire in northeast of the United States.

The countries invited to attend the meeting were `likely winners` since the war in East Asia was still not over. Japan surrendered several months later. The Bretton Woods meeting was held largely at the urging of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, who had studied the economic aftermath of the First World War. He had concluded that the seeds for the Second World War were sown when the victors of the conflict chose to punish and humiliate those who had lost and laid down their arms.

Keynes wrote about the treatment meted out to the vanquished arguing that real peace would only return if the European countries could rebuild their economies and provide hope to all the people in the continent no matter whether they were the winners or the losers.

His advice was not taken and the result, as he had predicted, was another European upheaval. Germany took to the battlefield again in order to avenge the humiliation at Versailles.

The task before the conferees was easy at Bretton Woods. While several countries had helped with the war effort,there was only one clear winner, the United States. And there was also one clear thinker. John Keynes provided the intellectual underpinning of the system of global economic and financial management that was to emerge from these deliberations.

The countries attending the meeting decided to adopt a system of two-tier exchange rate with all currencies linked to the American dollar at a fixed rate and the dollar itself pegged at the rate of $38 per ounce of gold. If countries got into external financial crisis they would be provided funds by the International Monetary Fund, a new institution set up for this purpose.The Fund`s resources would come from the quotas paid to it by the member countries with the United States paying the most. These payments would be used by the Fund to create its own currency, the Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

As the name suggests these constituted the `rights` the member nations could exercise in proportion to the contributions they had made to the Fund`s capital. But the withdrawal will not be automatic. It could be made by the country in distress after it had satisfied the authorities in the Fund that they were making policy adjustments to prevent the recurrence of the crisis.

But the Fund`s mandate was to dealwith emergencies. War-torn Europe needed to be rebuilt as well. For this purpose the Bretton Woods conferees created another institution and called it the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IBRD. The bank was promised a lot of capital but only a part of it was `paid-in`. It could use the rest of the promised money as collateral to raise funds in the capital markets by selling bonds. Later, when a number of former European colonies became independent countries, the IBRD expanded its mandate and changed its name to the World Bank.

What this brief history of the past experience of creating order out of chaos tells us is that it is possible to restructure the global system if there are people who have the intelligence and the foresight to think deep into the future. There are not many at this time who could fit that description. In 2008 when Barack Obama won the election to the US presidency there was an impression that a man of vision had arrived on the scene. His slogan `yes, we can` not only excited the electorate in the United States but reverberated across the globe. Unfortunately, he has fallen short of what was expected of him.

The global economy is now faced with three different sets of crises that need to be dealt with simultaneously since they impact on one another. The first of these, of course, is the crisis in Europe where a bunch of countries on the continent`s periphery have gotten into a cycle which may end in at least one of them most likely Greece defaulting on its foreign obligations.The situation in these countries has earned them their own unflattering acronym the PIIGS for Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. If a default does occur several large European banks that hold large amounts of PIIGS debt will face possible bankruptcy. This will set up a chain reaction reminiscent of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the United States that froze for a while all institutional credit. The solution to the European crisis is to create an institutional mechanism that will allow the countries under stress to borrow from an entity backed by the powerful states in the Union. This means institutional support by Germany and to a lesser extent France. Neither especially Germany is prepared to go that route. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is too afraid of the political right in her country to take on extra burden to save the Eurozone from collapsing.

The second crisis is in the United States where a new political movement the Tea Party Movement has created an environment in which policymakers are too scared to tread. The tepid economic recovery in the country that has kept the rate of unemployment very high and for a very long time must not be allowed to persist. It does not call for cutting down government spending as the Tea Partiers want and are likely to get unless someone in the political system is prepared to provide real leadership. What is needed is a significant increase in government expenditure over the short term for as long as economic recovery remains sluggish and the rate of unemployment is unacceptably high. The only person whocould do that is President Obama but he will have to first shed his diffidence and distaste for strong action.

The third problem not quite a crisis at this time but could become one if attention is not given to it is the consequence of the accumulated reserves in the emerging world that are mostly invested in the United States and to a lesser extent in Europe and Japan. These reserves are the result of the East Asians selling more in the global market place than they have been buying for themselves and the oil-exporting countries able to charge a high price for their abundant resource.

About two thirds of the total global savings of some $10 trillion are with these countries. If for whatever reason, confidence in one of the large economic entities in the world the United States and the European Union were to suddenly disappear there will a run on the liquidation of these reserves. This will be the equivalent of the dreaded run on the banks.

What the global economy needs at this time is a mechanism that addresses these problems and finds a comprehensive solution. This is what was done in 1944 by the victors of the Second World War. If there was an expectation that something like Bretton Woods II would come out from the recently concluded annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that did not happen. The leaders of global finance have gone home after giving long speeches on the threat their respective countries and the world collectively face without promising action.

Creating order out of chaos | ePaper | DAWN.COM
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Breakdown of the grand bargain — II



By Shahid Javed Burki
Published: October 10, 2011


The Arab Spring has resulted in breaking down what might be called the ‘grand bargain’ between the West and the autocratic governments that had long dominated the Arab and Muslim worlds. This bargain filled in the vacuum created first by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early parts of the 20th century, followed by the end of colonialism a few decades later in the same century. But the Arab world was too important a geographic space to be left to the own devices of the countries that were created, most of them artificially, by the departing colonial powers. What was put in place was an informal arrangement that might be called the ‘grand bargain’.

It had four components. Three of these were promises of good behaviour in terms of the strategic interests of the West on the part of the ruling establishment. The fourth was the implicit — on some occasions explicit — promise by America and Europe to protect the establishment from its own people.

The West wanted the Arab leaders to ensure its access to the vast energy resources of the region. Its dependence on oil from the Middle East increased in the 1990s as the rates of economic growth in almost all countries in this part of the world reached levels without precedence in their recent economic histories. None of the western capitals wished to live through once again the uncertainty and economic upheaval caused by the oil embargo imposed by the Arab oil producers to punish the United States for its unqualified support of Israel. That was the first and only time the Arab governments took collective action to protest what they considered to be the wrong done to the Palestinians by the West, in particular by the United States.

The West also wanted unhindered access to the economically and strategically important sea lanes that pass through the waters controlled by the countries in the area. The memory of the 1956 nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Gemal Abdul Nasser, the nationalist leader of Egypt, while dimmed by time, was still a part of the strategic thinking in the West. The nationalisation was the only time that a deep fissure developed among the western countries in the post-World War era. Britain and France attempted to annul Nasser’s act by sending in their militaries while the United States was troubled by the moves of the two major European powers. The Israelis also moved their troops and flotilla and another war in the Middle East seemed imminent. However, Washington stepped in to prevent any such flare-up. President Dwight Eisenhower ordered London and Paris to pull back their assault troops, the only time the United States took an action that was not totally in favour of the Jewish state.

The third element in the grand bargain was the Arab acceptance of the creation of Israel and the recognition of the Jewish state. A significant step in that direction was taken by Egypt when its president on March 26, 1979 signed the peace agreement with Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel. The move was not welcomed for some time by the rest of the Arab world. A few months after the signing of the agreement in America, the Arab League expelled Egypt from its membership and moved its headquarter from Cairo and Tunis. While the boundaries of Israel were not defined in this agreement or the one signed subsequently with Jordan by Israel, the Israelis kept changing the ‘facts on the ground’ by expanding their settlements deep into the West Bank. They have continued to implement this strategy.

In return for these three parts of the grand bargain, the West implicitly pledged not only to tolerate the Arab regimes but provide them with military support when their existence was threatened by some internal forces. They also allowed the members of the establishment to store their looted riches in the West — in the form of large bank accounts and large real estate holdings. This is one reason why George HW Bush, then the American president, went to war in 1991 to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait after the latter had invaded the country in his immediate neighbourhood. Allowing Saddam to stay in Kuwait would have been against the grand bargain. He had to be expelled.

It didn’t matter that the regimes the West supported were often brutal towards their people and plundered the enormous wealth of the countries over which they presided. It should have been seen by the parties involved in the grand bargain that it would not produce a stable economic and political order. Several policy analysts had warned as long ago as the 1960s when their works were published in the United States that political institutions must be allowed to develop to accommodate economic change. One of them was Samuel P Huntington, a Harvard political scientist who was later to win fame by predicting what he called a clash between two civilizations, the West and Islam. In an earlier work he argued that economic progress produces societal tensions. He suggested, in a book titled Political Order in Changing Societies, that those who feel “relatively deprived” will agitate, if not altogether rebel, against the state. The same conclusion was reached by the economist Albert O Hirschman, also of Harvard University, who discussed the three choices that are available and could be exercised by the deprived – exit, voice or royalty. The Arab street chose voice over the two other options.

With the Arab Spring having disposed of three long-enduring regimes — in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, in that order — and may succeed in bringing down at least three more — Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, difficult to say in which order — the will of the people can no longer be ignored. Factoring in what the people want in policymaking has already resulted in the collapse of the ‘grand bargain”. A new order has already begun to take shape and will affect the relations of the countries in the region with the West, in particular with the United States.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 10th, 2011.
Breakdown of the grand bargain
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Likely cuts in US aid



By Shahid Javed Burki
Monday, 10 Oct, 2011


AS the political system in the United States grapples with the popular demand to cut government expenditure and reduce the burden of debt the country carries, one outcome is clear.

America will be less generous towards its foreign friends. What kind of impact this will have on Pakistan? Pakistan, by some counts, is now the second largest recipient of aid from Washington. Israel is the largest beneficiary. Before the government of President Hosni Mobarrak was overthrown, Egypt was in the second place. Israel receives $3 billion a year from Washington.

Under the Kerry-Lugar Bill signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009, Pakistan was supposed to get $1.5 billion a year as economic assistance. Additional amounts are to be provided to the military for assistance it provides the US for the American operations in Afghanistan. The military is also to get help to improve its capacity to fight terrorism.

Before discussing the impact on Pakistan, I will briefly discuss America`s aid politics .Democrats and Republicans don`t agree on most things but there is agreement between them on reducing the amount of money the US spends on foreign aid. For the fiscal year that started on October 1, the Obama administration proposed spending of $59 billion on international affairs, $6 billion more than spent in the earlier year.

In financial year 2010, the first year of the Obama administration, expenditure for this item had increased to $55 billion.

Most of this was spent by the State Department which, through the Agency for International Development (AID), provides economic assistance to the countries Washington wishes to help.

In the US political system, on matters of government spending, the executive branch proposes while the legislature disposes. At this time both parts of the US Congress, the House and the Senate, are inclined to be far less generous in providing foreign assistance than the amount asked for by the Obama administration.

The House appropriations subcommittee which is now controlled by the Republicans has cut $12 billion from the administration`s request. Its proposed amount of $47 billion has $39 billion for State Department`s operations and aid and $7.6 billion for what is described asthe `contingency account for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.` Even the Senate version of the budget seeks a cut of $6 billion in the Obama proposal. This part of Congress is still in the hands of Democrats, President Obama`s political party.

The proposed declines in spending on foreign operations will bring it down to 0.95 per cent of the federal budget. In 1985, the share of foreign operations had reached two per cent fueled, in part, by the first war in Afghanistan when the United States was closely aligned with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. The proportion declined to about 0.9 per cent in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There was another spike after 9/11 when the United States embarked on an effort to `win the hearts and minds` of the people in the Muslim world. There was a belief that one way to stop the attraction of the country`s youth for extremist groups in the Muslim world was to quicken the pace of economic development in the countries in the area. Pakistan was to be a major beneficiary of this effort.

It would be fair to conclude that the United States` foreign aid is motivated by the country`s strategic interests rather than by the desire to help the less developed parts of the world. Strategic consideration motivates in particular the Republicans, the party that is now at the forefront of the move to reduce government expenditure.

According to one assessment, `the Republicans attach conditions on aid to Pakistan, Egypt and the Palestinians, suspending the latter entirely if the Palestinians succeed in winning recognition of statehood at the UN. However, one of the largest portions of foreign aid -more than $3 billion for Israel-is left untouched in both the House and Senate versions, showing that even in times of austerity, some spending is inviolable.

The presence of a strong domestic lobby for Israel in the United States helps a great deal in securing assistance from the country. This is what Israel is able to do and what the Indians have begun to do. All one needs to do to understand how weak is Pakistan`s situation in the US is to pick up any mainstream newspaper any day and read the coverage on Pakistan.

While the clear intention behind the Kerry-Lugar legislations was not to link the flow of economic assistance on conditions that would not reflect the US`s strategic interests, there is now considerable pressure on the Obama administration to reverse course.To take one example of thispressure: In a recent article in The Washington Post, the authors John Podesta and Caroline Wadhams suggest that aid should be used to get Pakistan into line with American interests. `If Pakistan cannot bring insurgent elements to the negotiating table, and present a plan for a political settlement or a desired outcome, the United States should begin by labelling the Haqqani network a terror group. Other options include cutting all military assistance to Pakistan, and coordinating among international and regional allies to more sharply contain and isolate Pakistan.

The article is important since Podesta, one of its authors, is an important figure in Obama`s political party. He was the head of the transition team appointed by Barack Obama after the winning the elections in 2008.

Washington has as yet to do the arithmetic to understand how much leverage it carries in terms of the economic and military assistance it provides Pakistan.

Cutting military aid would do much more damage than reducing economic aid. The first two years of the five-year period covered by Kerry-Lugar should have produced $3 billion worth of capital flows to Pakistan. That hasn`t happened. The total amount of help Pakistan has received is a fraction of that amount.

Even if the entire $1.5bn a year were to be disbursed in net terms excluding the amounts spent on administering aid and also the large amounts charged by the US consultants who work on the various projects Washington is supporting the amount is more like a billion dollars a year.

Since those who have studied the US aid effort in Pakistan have concluded that it is poorly managed, the impact on growth is perhaps no more that 0.14 per cent of GDP. If Pakistan were to lose the entire pledged aid, its impact on growth will be very small.

The other way of looking at the impact of aid is to calculate the contribution it makes to meeting the financial gap the country has because of the difference between the value of imports and exports the `trade gap`and the amount needed to service outstanding foreign debt. This gap is of the order of $15 billion a year. If the full amount of American aid were to be disbursed, it would amount to only six to seven per cent of the total financial gap.

The conclusion from this brief analysis is that aid flows don`t provide the kind of leverage the United States thinks it has on Pakistan to do what is in Washington`s interests. What Islamabad should be keeping in view is its own strategic interests.

Likely cuts in US aid | ePaper | DAWN.COM
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Breakdown of the grand bargain — III


By Shahid Javed Burki
Published: October 17, 2011


For some reasons that will be identified and discussed by historians for decades to come, several countries in the Muslim world began to see a change in the structure of their politics more or less at the same time. Perhaps the rise of al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the United States and the American response made the populations in dozens of Muslim countries to question the systems of governance they had lived under and tolerated for many decades. The Americans began to describe 9/11 as an event that changed the world. That change not only affected them but seems to have contributed to bringing change in the Muslim world as well. What is generally referred to as the ‘Arab Spring’ is the result of the reaction to what had happened in and around the Muslim world.

In some countries such as Indonesia and Pakistan, democratic systems that had appeared off and on began to be consolidated. This went further in Indonesia than in Pakistan. The Indonesians have held two open and fair elections since the fall of Suharto and the country is now governed by an elected president and parliament that operates within an accepted democratic framework. The system now works to manage transition from one set of rulers to another. This is ultimately the test of a working democratic system. As discussed in an earlier article, even in an established democratic system such as the one India has operated with some success for several decades, the issue of transition remains unsettled. At least in the largest political organisation, the Congress Party, leadership has been passing from one generation to another.

This brings me to raise a couple of interesting questions the answers to which, in the absence of research —which will no doubt be carried out at some stage — can only be in the nature of speculation. Why has the Muslim world led the movement to make established political order responsive to the wishes and aspirations of the citizenry? Why have the people living in democratic systems come out on the streets and started to demand change? There cannot be any doubt that the ‘Arab street’ has inspired movements in India, Israel, Spain, Greece, Britain, even in New York’s Wall Street. As Nichloas Kulish of the The New York Times put it in a thoughtful article, the “consensus that had emerged after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union that liberal economics combined with democratic institutions represented the only path forward…has been shaken and broken by a seemingly endless crises.” That consensus was the main theme of Francis Fukuyama’s widely read book, The End of History and the Last Man. Disillusionment with western liberal democracy and capitalism is widespread not only in the developing world, but also in the parts of the world where these philosophies were developed and put into practice. Policy makers all over the world have been found wanting. They have been unable to cushion their people from the shocks the economic systems have delivered over the last several years. The real issue in India and in some of the other old democracies is the loss of confidence on the part of the electorate in the political system.

There are perhaps two reasons why the citizens of the Muslim world have led the way in demanding change. First, the autocratic systems in most countries in this part of the world kept their citizens at a distance much greater than was the case in established and democratic systems. The political orders in these nations were inherently unstable. They had to give way once the people found a way of getting organised and coming out in numbers that overwhelmed the security systems. Second, the first reaction to the ‘grand bargain’ that gave the West’s cover to the autocratic regimes took the form of religious upheaval. The rise of the al Qaeda and other like-minded groups may have drawn some recruits from the disgruntled but the vast number of the indignados — as the outraged and the disappointed are called in Spanish — could not possibly find much comfort in this form of Islamic revival. Solutions for them have to be found in the political and economic order that cannot be hijacked by the elite — even if the elite owe their economic and political positions to elections held within democratic frameworks. Given the turmoil and uncertainty, even within the established political and economic systems, the question arises as to what kind of models the Muslim world should follow as it seeks to bring about change?

There is a continuum among Muslim nations that has Turkey and Saudi Arabia occupying the two extremes. There are changes taking place even in these two countries that are poles apart. In late September King Abdullah promised to open up the political system a little when by 2015 women would be allowed to vote in municipal elections and also have the right to be appointed to the Advisory Council. However, even as this announcement was receiving some attention and restrained applause, a Saudi woman was sentenced to receive ten lashes. Her offense: she was driving her car. She was later pardoned by the King. Turkey, on other hand, was moving in the other direction. It had decided to dilute some of the westernisation and little bit of the secularism that had become the defining features of the system bequeathed by Kamal Ataturk. But it has preserved the secular basis of the Turkish state. In between these two extremes are dozens of countries that are attempting to find their political feet. Some of them such as Tunisia and Egypt, are working to develop new structures from scratch; some like Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan are struggling to make their systems more egalitarian and representative; some such as Syria and Yemen are still engaged in using the security apparatus to keep the old order in place. In this kind of fluid situation, what would be the role of Islam in the political structures that have begun to evolve in the liberated parts of the Arab world? I will turn to this question in the article in this space next week.

Source: Breakdown of the Grand Bargain III
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Can China fill the need gap?


By Shahid Javed Burki
Monday, 17 Oct, 2011



SINCE Pakistan gained independence 64 years ago, it has needed foreign funds to augment its poor domestic savings. That was generally true of all the countries that emerged from under colonial rule in the 1940s and 1950s and became independent.

This was also the time when improvements in public health added significantly to life expectancy in what came to be called, the developing world. Low savings meant low rates of investment which in turn meant low rates of GDP growth. Low GDP growth would translate into higher incidence of poverty for the rapidly increasing populations in the developing world.

The only way to break into this vicious cycle was to have government-to-government aid flow into the developing world.

Most developed countries came up with aid programmes while the World Bank and its sister regional banks were equipped to finance development in poor nations.

Pakistan`s leaders thought that they could use the strategic location of their country as an added reason why the West in particular the United States would come to its assistance. In the 1960s, the 1980s and the early 2000s, it received large amounts of aid from Washington.

Some $20 billion flowed into the country in the ten year period since the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US. Then president Pervez Musharraf responded positively to Washington`s call for help and the country was compensated by the Americans. The US launched attacks on Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 using Pakistan`s airspace.

These three periods of extensive American help produced one positive and one negative impact. The positive impact was that in each of these three periods the growth rate of Pakistan`s national product increased by 50 per cent, more than its structural rate of increase.

Without external help, Pakistan cannot have managed a GDP growth rate of more than 4-4.5 per cent a year. In the aid-abundant periods, the GDP increased by an average of 6.5 per cent a year. The negative consequence of foreigner assistance was that practically no effort was made to raise resources for de-velopment from within the economy.

Economists and financial people call this mode of behaviour `moral hazard`. If there are friends prepared to support, you turn to them during periods of crisis rather than make own sacrifices to avoid repeating the situation. For many reasons, that option may no longer be available to Pakistan at this time. The United States has gone negative on Pakistan. Its senior leaders continue to hold it responsible for the difficulties Washington is running into as it begins to pull out of Afghanistan.

Having softened somewhat the public statements issued by Admiral Mike Mullen who has recently retired as the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US, the administration went back to beating on Pakistan.

On October 6, President Obama in a press conference called to address America`s economic difficulties was asked about Pakistan. His long answer was not encouraging for Pakistan. `I think that they have hedged their bets in terms of what Afghanistan would look like,` he told the press.

`And part of hedging their bets is having interactions with some of the unsavory characters who they think might end up regaining power in Afghanistan after coalition forces have left. The United States will constantly evaluate Pakistan`s cooperation. But there is no doubt, you know, we`re not going to feel comfortable with a long-term strategic relationship with Pakistan if we don`t think that they are not mindful of our interests as well`.

The American president left no doubt in the minds of his listeners at the press conference where his country was headed in terms of its relations with Pakistan. One newspaper analyst drew the right conclusions. `Mr Obama`s remarks seemed to call into question whether the United States could continue supplying Pakistan with billions of dollars in military and economic aid, as it has done since the September 11 attacks, if its intelligence service could not be persuaded to drop its support for militant groups long used as proxies against India and Afghanistan, wrote Rick Gladstone of The New York Times.

This is a demand Pakistan is unlikely to meet given the sentiment that exists in the country about the United States.

A recent Pew Center survey reports that only 12 per cent of the Pakistani population has a favourable view ofthe United States.

As suggested in an earlier article in this space withdrawal of economic aid by the United States will not be disastrous for the Pakistani economy. But military aid has been significant and since money is fungible its decline will put pressure on the country`s already precarious resource situation.

It is the hope of the Pakistani policymakers and its citizens that China will step into the gap, increasing its already significant involvement with Pakistan.

But there are serious doubts in some policy circles whether Beijing would be prepared to commit itself to Pakistan`s development as much as the Pakistanis would like.

According to one analysis, `a rising China with global ambitions is unlikely to supplant the United States in Pakistan.

And while Pakistan`s latest flirtations with Beijing have been received cordially, Pakistani officials have walked away from their junkets with far less that they might have hoped.

Nonetheless, the two countries do share a strategic interest in limiting India`s rising influence in the area. Beijing in particular would not want a very close relationship to develop between Washington and New Delhi. All the talk about, `all-weather friendship` between the two countrieshas yet to be translated into close economic links.

For instance trade between China and Pakistan remains less than significant. It has grown to $9 billion with Pakistan`s exports only a billion dollars. China`s trade with India, on the other hand, exploded from $2.9 billion in 2000 to $61 billion in 2010. This was a twenty-fold increase in a decade.

At some stage China would like to develop a naval presence in the Arabian Sea and also gain access for its western provinces to the sea. This would mean upgrading the port at Gwadar on the Balochistan coast and the Karakoram Highway.

According to the analyst quoted above, China`s `core interests lie somewhere else -in its competition with the United States and in East Asia. It has shown little interest in propping up the troubled Pakistan economy, consistently passing up opportunities to do so.` The implication of the American displeasure with Pakistan and not enough interest on the part of the Chinese is that Pakistan will have to rely on its own resources to finance the working of the government, pay for defence and invest in development. No country has ever succeeded in moving towards sustainable development without investing its own resources.

Can China fill the need gap? | ePaper | DAWN.COM
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Post Breakdown of the grand bargain IV

Breakdown of the grand bargain IV


By Shahid Javed Burki
Published: October 24, 2011


The breakdown of the grand bargain between the West and the Middle East means that the countries that have managed to get rid of the old and established order are beginning with a clean slate. In designing new political structures and putting into place new economic models, they will have to define their approach towards a number of elements that were once part of the grand bargain. The first is the nature of the political system and that includes the role of Islam in politics. The second is the role of the state, which means the relationship between those who govern and over whom they govern.

In the old and now discarded system, Islam was kept out of politics. The West, which was the other party in the grand design, was not comfortable with the influence Islam could exercise on politics. For instance, France encouraged the Algerian establishment not to give up power to an Islamic party that had clearly won in the elections to the national legislature. Similarly, the United States and most of its European allies have refused to accept the political legitimacy of Hamas in Palestine in spite of that party’s overwhelming triumph in electoral politics. That won’t be possible in the new order that is now emerging in the countries that have freed themselves of authoritarian rule and will increasingly detach themselves from the West.

But bringing Islam into politics does not mean making a political system Islamic. As Humeira Iqtidar, a Pakistani scholar who teaches in London, points out in her new book, the differences between what can be called Islamists, Islamic revivalists, and Islamic fundamentalists should be understood in order to fully comprehend what is happening in most of the Islamic world. For her, Islamist movements are concerned with introducing broad Islamic principles and values into the working of the state by using democratic processes. That has happened in Turkey and will probably happen in many other parts of the Muslim world. Reformist Islam, as the term suggests, means interpreting the religion so that it does not come into serious conflict with modern ways. Those who can be called Islamic fundamentalists are people who belong to, provide support to and sympathise with movements such as al Qaeda. They interpret the religion in its most fundamentalist sense. But as Raza Aslan, the American-Iranian scholar of Islam, points out in his book Cosmic Wars, fundamentalism is not unique to Islam. Similar movements have captured political space in Christian and Jewish societies. The rampage in Oslo by Andres Behring Breivik, the Norwegian religious activist, is an example of a fundamentalist action in a non-Muslim society.

The post-grand bargain societies in the Middle East are now deeply engaged in this debate as they begin the task of providing them with new political structures.

This debate has been picked up by Islamic activists in Egypt, another country engaged in a similar exercise. Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a former Muslim brotherhood leader who is a candidate for the country’s presidency, has joined several breakaway political parties in suggesting that “the state should avoid interpreting Islam or enforcing Islamic law, regulating religious texts or barring a person from running for president based on gender or religion”. The debate in the post-Arab Spring world, therefore, is not about how much influence Islam should have on statecraft. The issue is whether those who are devout can be accommodated within policymaking circles.

Even though it is still too early to predict what will be the political order that will take shape in the countries that were directly affected by the Arab Spring, one thing is clear. Islam in politics will no longer be a taboo subject. It will be accommodated in some form other in the political lives of these nations.

What kind of state will emerge once the Arab world, unsettled by recent events, finds its political feet? There are no working models in the Arab world. The only one the emerging leadership can look to is Turkey which, in many remarkable ways, has been able to combine Islam with modernity.

Source: Breakdown of Grand Bargain IV
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Monday, 24 Oct, 2011



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Pakistan and America: A roller-coaster relationship


By Shahid Javed Burki
Published: October 31, 2011


By one count, this is the third time in about 50 years that Pakistan’s relations with the United States are moving through a rough patch. In a series of several articles, one today and more to follow in the weeks to come, I will provide a brief history of Pakistan’s relations with the United States and then go on to examine where the two countries may be heading in the next several years.

Field Marshal Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first military president, was the architect of a close relationship with the United States. America then was one of the two superpowers. By concluding two defence agreements with Washington, he distanced his country from the Soviet Union, the other superpower. This was a different line from the one pursued by most other developing nations. India, under Jawaharlal Nehru, had joined other large developing countries to follow what came to be called the ‘non-aligned movement’, or NAM. The NAM countries kept themselves at an equal distance from the two superpowers. Pakistan, along with some nations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, cast its lot with the United States.

When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, once Ayub Khan’s foreign minister, questioned this approach, the military leader countered by titling his political autobiography, Friends not Masters. Bhutto had suggested that Pakistan had acquired a ‘master’ by entering into several defence relationships with the United States. The former foreign minister responded by writing his own book under the title of Myth of Independence. The two books appeared after the United States had already walked out of Pakistan. This happened when Islamabad went to war with India in September 1965. Washington responded by cutting military and economic aid to Pakistan. The close relationship engineered by Ayub Khan thus lasted for just over a decade.

The second close alliance between Pakistan and America was also under a military president, this time under General Ziaul Haq. There was clearer quid pro quo this time around. Pakistan agreed to help the United States throw out the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Moscow had sent its troops into Afghanistan in 1979 when a series of changes in Kabul seemed to threaten its hold over that country. Occupation of Afghanistan by the rival superpower was not acceptable to the United States. Pakistan was a partner in the proxy war fought by Washington that ultimately expelled the Soviet Union from Afghanistan a decade after its troops had entered the country. America lost interest in Pakistan and the region in which it is located once Moscow pulled out its troops.

Deciding that Pakistan was no longer strategically important for the United States, President George HW Bush invoked the Pressler Amendment, which required that Washington would not provide economic or military assistance to a country that was thought to be developing a nuclear arsenal. However, it took almost a decade for relations between Pakistan and the United States to completely rupture. This happened in 1998 when Pakistan exploded a series of nuclear devices in the hills of Balochistan. Pakistan’s explosions followed those by India. Washington was now under President Bill Clinton who, following the nuclear tests, froze all contacts between the two countries. A year later, the American president reacted very negatively to the coup that brought the military back to power in Islamabad. He snubbed Pakistan after a very successful visit to India. He visited Islamabad briefly but refused to shake hands with General Pervez Musharraf, the new military head of the Pakistani state.

America’s stance towards Pakistan changed dramatically after the country was attacked by a group of Islamic extremists on September 11, 2001. George W Bush, the new American president, gave Pakistan a clear warning. Islamabad was told that “either you are with us or you are against us” in the fight against international terrorism. To the surprise of the American administration, Pakistan quickly agreed to the terms laid out by Washington. Later, after leaving office, President Musharraf revealed that Richard Armitage, the then American deputy secretary of state, told the Pakistanis that if they did not cooperate with the United States as the latter set into motion the plans to attack Afghanistan, their country would be bombed back into the Stone Age. This was essentially the reason why Musharraf agreed to work with the United States, offering Pakistan’s air space for American bombers to reach Afghanistan and the use of the country’s road system to supply US and Nato forces operating there. In return, Pakistan’s relationship with the United States was raised to the level only a notch below what Washington had with Nato countries.

Following 9/11, Musharraf, earlier snubbed by the Clinton administration, became a welcome visitor to Washington. He was offered the real privilege to visit the presidential retreat at Camp David in the mountains of Maryland. Pakistan also received generous amounts of military and economic assistance. The amount provided in the 10-year period since September 11, 2011 is estimated at more than $20 billion. Pakistan thus became the second largest recipient of American aid after Israel. However, this amount, on a yearly basis and in real terms, was not more than that given during the period of Ayub Khan. But there was a difference. Washington indicated that this time around it will follow a different approach. Unlike previous associations, when Washington pulled out of Pakistan and the region whenever its strategic interests for involvement were not paramount, it pledged to place the new relationship on firmer ground. This was to be done by embedding assistance to Pakistan in a bill approved by Congress for a period that would last for at least five years. That way the discretion of the executive branch in dealing with Pakistan would become less subject to the whims of those who occupied the White House. A bill was passed and was signed into law in the summer of 2009 by Barack Obama, the newly elected president. However, as I will discuss later, even this time around the relationship did not get out of the roller coaster it had ridden for over half a century.

Source: Pakistan and America Relationships
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