Lau

By Zofeen Ebrahim

TOKYO, Oct 13 (TerraViva) – World Bank president Jim Yong Kim first used the phrase, and then the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde followed. Or was it the other way round? Whatever the case, ‘inclusive growth’ will be the new development mantra, adding to the already jargon-infested discourse of the world of the United Nations and non-governmental organisations.
But as Masaki Inaba of the Ugoku/Ugokasu, and Asko Osaki of Gender Action Platform, two Japanese non-governmentalorganisations, put it, ‘inclusive growth’ needs to be defined so that it does not just stay a buzzword.

At present, over one billion people live in extreme poverty and 200 million are unemployed. The richest one percent of the world’s population owns 40 percent of global assets, while the bottom half of the world’s population have just one percent of global wealth concentration. Against this backdrop, it is time to look beyond economic growth and turn it into economic justice, development experts said.

This is part of the rethinking of the limited definitions and measures of development as the 2015 deadline of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) nears. Debate continues on what comes after that, and including calls for a review of the phase ‘MDGs’ itself.

If growth and modernisation are linked to development but uses wealth as a determinant, like it has happened in China, ‘development’ would be temporary and come at the cost of inequality, Lau Kin Chi from the Lingnan University in Hong Kong, pointed out.

She works with rural communities, where the majority of the Chinese reside, encouraging ecological development that builds on human relations and their links to nature, which had collapsed in the rat race towards modernisation.

“We have diverse experiences in the inclusive economy at the field level. It is time to convey to the governments and the donor countries that these should be turned into strategies and eventually become government policy for social security, better employment,” said Inaba.

Indeed, Indian educationist Vinod Raina says that when social movements go into policy framework and this is combined with health, education and food security, it contributes to an environment where people can live with dignity.

He gave the example of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA), a job guarantee scheme in India. It provides legal guarantee for 100 days of employment in every financial year to a person in rural household who is willing to take up unskilled manual work at a wage of 2.27 U.S. dollars per day in 2009. “It was launched in 2006 in 200 poorest of the 630 districts, but became so successful that it quickly spread to cover all the districts,” Raina said. “Most rural development work is now carried out by villagers and it has also put a stop to migration.”

Indian civil society – there are some two million non-government organisations in the country – has not been overly enthusiastic about owning the MDGs since the targets were designed by donor countries and premised on rich countries’ commitment to set aside 0.7 percent of their GDP for aid to poor countries. This commitment, however, was never kept to, especially as economic woes put pressure on donor governments’ budgets.

India, instead, showed that using the rights framework worked because it ensured that the country’s high growth rate could be used to translate into qualitative changes in development internally.

In recent years, added Raina, several rights campaigns have emerged and a number have made significant impact. These include campaigns around the right to information, which has helped curb corruption and brought about greater transparency. The right to work was passed in 2005, the right to forest dwellers to forests passed in 2006, and the right to education in 2009. The right to food and land is already in the Parliament, while the right to health is being discussed. “These are rights which are not being addressed by the MDGs,” said Raina, the key architect of the Right to Education Act.

Osaki, for her part, looked at inclusive growth with a gender lens: “The macro economy is not gender neutral; in fact it is gender blind. It means the gender division of labour is ignored, as is unpaid work.”

Work done at home – laundry, cleaning, cooking, the care of children, elderly and the sick and disabled, and taking care of the natural environment – is mostly carried out by women and young girls, and remains unpaid. This feminisation of care work results in feminisation of poverty. “It takes energy and time and negatively affects the empowerment of women,” Osaki pointed out.

The same work, when outsourced, becomes paid. However, contended Osaki, they are still lowly paid jobs when done by migrant women, whose labour is mean to economically empower the women employers in the households they work in.

In that context, she emphasised, there continued to be a need to value women’s contributions, to have unpaid care work taken account in macro-economic policymaking, and to in effect revalue such work as paid work.   (END)

“It is useful for us to participate in the civil society policy forum during the IMF-World Bank annual meetings because it gives us the chance to present the data and our critics,” said Zachary Hurwitz, policy coordinator for International Rivers based in California, United States.

“Yesterday I shared the seminar on the environmental flows and downstream impacts: The Bank’s Record and Lessons for the Safeguards Review, I was able to show many cases in Vietnam, Laos…South Africa,” he said, adding that he finally got positive feedback from the World Bank.

Jeroen Kwakkenbos, policy and advocacy officer for European Network on debt and development based in Brazil, said: “The most important thing that I am interested in is that (a lot of) African infrastructure development still need to be done,” he said.

But Geoffrey Chongo, programme manager of Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR) in Zambia, said that the IMF and World Bank should be prescribing and undertaking reforms mainly for the interest of local people, and not just doing them in order to attract foreign investment.

Over the last few days, he said many discussions focused on reforming tax regulation, access to capital and so forth. “These are the crucial for foreign investors, but not the interest for local people,” he pointed out.  (Sam Rith)

TerraViva: What have you learned from these meetings?

 Mak: What I learned most relates to the youth, the shortage jobs for youth that the leaders of IMF and World Bank are very interested in. I found that there are a lot of joblessness among the youth, and that there will be more cooperation to resolve the economic crisis, youth issues, and joblessness. I have listened to different guest speakers in different seminars during the IMF-World Bank meetings talk about how to resolve the joblessness of the youth. They said that SMEs play very important role (in this). I found out that the leaders of IMF and World Bank showed high commitment not (only to) reduce the poverty, but to end poverty.

TerraViva: What are the challenges that Cambodian youth face today?

 Mak: Cambodian youth now are facing illiteracy, lack of education, lack of skills that the market requires. Not many of our youths now participate in implementing political, democracy, human rights and local governance. We have about 8 million youths, about 60 to 65 percent of the population. We do not have parliamentarians aged below 35. Each year, thousands of students graduate from schools and colleges but there is no working opportunity in their local areas. The other issue is that the poverty limits them from being able to get education, health treatment and other services. Drugs are still a problem.

TerraViva: Cambodia has been receiving a lot of aid from developed countries, World Bank, IMF and others after the civil war. How important will aid continue to be for the country?

 Mak: We still need aid from outside because the government has not yet managed effectively to raise internal resources including natural resources, human resources and others.

Tokyo at night.

   By Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Oct 13 (TerraViva) – Forty-eight years ago in September 1964, Japan hosted the International Monetary Fund-World Bank annual meetings as a borrower. This week, the gleaming Japanese capital hosted the same meetings as a top international lender and the world’s third largest economy.

    The story of Japan’s change from aid recipient to top donor has been a recurring backdrop at the meetings here, but analysts warn that this revolutionary transformation gives no reason for smug celebration.

   Instead, they say, the deeper mood in Tokyo as it basks in the international limelight is one of restless foreboding coupled with a yearning for reforms of the very same institutions that nurtured it when it was a post-war economy on recovery.

   “Japan faces tough challenges today even though the country has come a long way from the ashes of the war when it was defeated in 1945,” said Dr Takehiko Ohta, an expert on land conservation policy who taught at the prestigious University of Tokyo.

   “I would describe the national mood as somber as we embark on the transition road to find apt and long-term solutions to our pressing problems,” said Ohta.

   Indeed, emerging alongside the major advances that Japan has made are those \that threaten its much-admired achievements.

   A stubborn three decade-long economic recession has seen growth rates fall to an average of 2 percent annually, a trend that has forced the government to cut back on its much-touted overseas development assistance (ODA) budget. It now ranks fifth among international donor countries, and its ODA has been decreasing by more than 7 percent annually.

   Its rapidly ageing population – Japan has the fastest ageing people in the world and some 20 percent of citizens are over 60 years old – is also something the country needs to find urgent solutions to, apart from wasteful public infrastructure projects and public debt that is ballooning as the government scrambles to support growing health and pension budgets.

   Unemployment – almost 10 percent among the younger generation – is also hurting public confidence given the fact 16 percent of Japan’s 127 million people is now on welfare assistance.

   Job opportunities for young people have become harder to find because companies are restricting hiring as they face competition from industrialising Asian neighbours that are now entering the global market.

   “Japan faces one of its worst postwar crises…. While the Great East Japan earthquake did immense damage to the country, it is undeniable that the self-conceit the nation developed during the period of high economic growth is partly to blame,” wrote the ‘Nikkei’, a leading Japanese financial daily, in its special on Japan-World Bank relations.

   Nikkei advocates that policymaking in Japan undergo oversight from third parties, pointing out that “government agencies are not always best at making plans”.

   While analysts view the Mar. 11, 2011 triple disaster of the Great Eastern Earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear accident as a huge blow to Japan, there is also growing consensus that this crisis could become the long-awaited catalyst to usher in important reforms.

   “The disaster has shaken the very foundations of Japan by revealing cracks in a system that was admired before. But the sobering evidence has brought important reform, some of them unthinkable in Japan,” observed Ohta.

   Ohta is now working on a coastal reforestation project in the tsunami- devastated north-east, led by a trilateral partnership among the local Nattori city, the civil society organization Oisca, and Wal-Mart Japan, which provides most of the funds.

   “Such collaboration and new partnerships would have been unthinkable a few decades ago,” he explained.

   For Japan’s Finance Minister Koriki Jojima, finding solutions means extending political support to weakened sectors of agriculture and medicine, which fell behind during the growth times that focused, among others, on developing the country’s much-vaunted automobile technology.

   “Subsidies aimed for job security now focuses on training youth,” he said, explaining the necessity for the younger generation to survive in a tougher and meaner global system. This situation is a far cry from that of their parents, who worked during the high-growth years.

    The Fukushima nuclear accident has indeed encouraged positive changes in Japan, according to Yurika Ayukawa, an expert on clean energy. She points to growing public opposition to nuclear power, which she says is “a major feat in a country that had traditionally accepted government slogans that justified large investments to build nuclear reactors on the basis of supporting economic development.”

   “When considering the support for change among average Japanese, there is no turning back,” insists Ayukawa. “This is the symbol of real change.” (END)

TOKYO, Oct 13 (TerraViva) – Vocational training, knowledge of international languages like English and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are the major factors that young people need to get jobs, development experts here said.

The discussion called ‘Avoiding A Lost Generation: The Challenges and Opportunities for Expanding Youth Employment’, held at the IMF-WB annual meetings here Thursday, focused on worries that the economic slowdown was leading to a shortage of jobs for young people entering the workforce around the world. This has been a key theme at the Tokyo meetings.

Dr Mohammad Shtayyeh, minister of the Palestinian Economic Council, suggested that each country establish “various vocational training programmes” for young people.

Heikki Holmas, Norway’s minister of international development, agreed, saying that young people have better chances to get proper jobs and better wages if they have skills that the market looks for.

They are also better off with knowledge of international languages like English and familiarity with ICTs, added Tjipke Bergsma, deputy CEO of Plan International in Britain.

He estimated that within the next 10 years, there will be one billion youth who would get employed around the world.

At the same, the speakers agreed that there remained barriers to the job market in many countries, including corruption, which undercut fair chances by the educated and skilled people to get quality jobs.

For example, Holmas said, there are cases where educated or skilled youth may not get jobs, while the uneducated or unskilled youth landed them because they know or have connections with people working at the hiring company or organisation.

By Johanna Son

TOKYO, Oct 12 (TerraViva) – Foreign donors are rushing into Burma, whose government has been pushing the right political buttons as part of its democratic reform process. But development planners and Burmese activists here caution that  the best approach should still be ‘easy does it’.

“Please, please, please don’t rush in,” Khin Ohmar, coordinator of the Thailand-based Burma Partnership, said at a discussion organised by civil society groups led by the Washington-based Bank Information Centre at the IMF-WB Annual Meetings in Tokyo on Friday.

Burma has been in civil war for more than 60 years and has not resolved many of its internal ethnic tensions, she pointed out. “So it’s worth it to step back and ensure that we start with the right stuff.”

“A lot of people still feel sceptical (of the civilian-led government’s promise of a people-centered government),” said Thein Swe, a Myanmar professor who works at Thailand’s Chiang Mai University and who has also worked with the Myanmar government.

“Yes a lot of changes are coming in. All the right terminology, development jargon, the government has started using (those), but on the ground the mindset remains the same,” he said. “Policymakers use the right words, but this has not trickled down to the bureaucracy.”

Khin Ohmar and Thein Swe spoke after officials from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (AsDB) said they were treading carefully for now and studying programmes to pursue or fund even though they have opened offices in the country.

Japan is Myanmar’s largest creditor so far, and has said it will give priority to aid to Myanmar, where elections led to political and economic reforms after the emergence of the civilian-led government of President Thein Sein in March 2011.

On Oct. 11, Japanese Finance Minister Koriki Jojima said Japan would resume yen loans to Myanmar early next year, after clearing that South-east Asian country’s loans of 500-billion yen (6.3 billion U.S. dollars), to help it get back on its feet.

In April, Japan agreed to cancel some 60 percent of Myanmar’s loans. Tokyo will also give bridge loans to help Myanmar refinance its loans to the World Bank and the AsDB that have been in arrears for a decade.

Thein Swe

Annete Dixon, World Bank director for South-east Asia, explained that these bridge loans would give Myanmar a longer time to pay the outstanding amounts. “But Myanmar is unlikely to be eligible for debt relief,” she pointed out.

Overall, she said, Myanmar has had a “massive donor influx but very weak receptive capacity” and thus needed good donor coordination. The government has set up a foreign aid coordination committee.

The World Bank’s engagement is “very preliminary”, she explained, although the Bank has opened an office it shares with the AsDB and the International Finance Corp. and is now recruiting staff.

“We had no country operations in the past, so we have decided we will take a step-by-step approach to ensure that our assistance in the future will be effective in addressing huge challenges ahead,” said Kunio Senga, head of the South-east Asia department at the Manila-based AsDB. It is quite “premature to specify and commit to specific country programmes” at
this point, he added.

Instead, the AsDB has been doing economic and sector analyses and consulting stakeholders as it prepares an “interim country partnership strategy” for the next 18 to 24 months, Senga explained.

But Dixon said that the Myanmar government has undertaken radical reforms in the economic, financial and political spheres.

The government is drawing up a development plan, released to the public the whole IMF assessment of its economy, and for the first time discussed the budget, passed it in Parliament, and aired this on television.

The changes underway in Myanmar are “an enormous challenge for the government, which has to get an idea of the sensible sequence of how to do things, need to show results quickly to its population which has high expectations, and embark on a process that we know takes decades,” Dixon explained.

But the picture from outside can be somewhat different from realities inside the country, Thein Swe said. He expressed worries about experts coming in droves because of aid programmes, saying “we don’t want
external-driven aid, but consultation with the grassroots community is crucial”.

In terms of foreign investments, he conceded that banks consider Myanmar the “last frontier” as it opens up. “A lot of investors are rushing in – there is big potential but we must be very cautious about what kind of investments we would like to embark on.”

Thein Swe also said that while the government has made improvements in transparency, the fact remains that the lower house of Parliament in August rejected a motion that would have required all government officials to publicly reveal their assets. “It is shameful,” he argued.

Both Khin Ohmar and Thein Swe agreed that the human rights environment in Myanmar cannot be separated from development plans for the country.  “The development agenda cannot be a substitute for a political
settlement,” Khin Ohmar said.

Both raised questions about the military’s continued role in the country, and said citizens need to get used to more political space and speak up.

Khin Ohmar

“We have to make sure that the role of the military will remain a positive one,” said Thein Swe. Under Myanmar’s constitution, the military get one quarter of seats in Parliament.

Khin Ohmar added that many citizens have yet to learn to speak their minds, a mindset that is the result of decades of military dictatorship. Besides, she added, even if the government showed Parliament discussions on television, “how many people can see it in the whole of Burma (where parts of the country still have no electricity)?”  (END)

To see a video interview with Khin Ohmar, visit:

http://www.ips.org/TV/2012IMF-WBAnnualMeetings/?p=203

At the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Tokyo on Friday, Japan and South Korea pledged 60 million U.S. dollars between them to improve food security in the developing countries that suffer from chronic hunger, exacerbated by the recent food price volatility.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced his country was prepared to add one dollar to every two dollars contributed by other donors up to a total of 475 million dollars.

Geithner said the US was committed to lead the fight against hunger and malnutrition, and wanted to help communities become more self-sufficient in food, help farmers increase productivity and reduce poverty.

World Bank President Jim Kong Kim said volatile food prices had damaging long-term consequences to the world’s poor. “A mother should not have to choose between feeding her children and sending them to school,” he said.

The new money will be channeled through a multi-donor trust fund created by the G20 in 2010 called the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme (GAFSP), which has already allocated 658 million dollars to 18 countries which are most vulnerable to the hike in food prices.

TOKYO, Oct 12 (TerraViva) – Universal access to healthcare must change from just a slogan to a reality, say civil society groups here that are calling on the World Bank to push this higher up on the political agenda.

In discussions on global health at the IMF-WB annual meetings here, health experts from the academia, the private sector and non-governmental organisations explored why investing in health makes good economic sense. It plays a critical role in social stability even in times of austerity, and is also an important safety net central to sustainable development.

But currently, only eight of the world’s 49 poorest countries have any chance of financing a set of basic services with their own domestic resources by 2015.

Still, experts agreed that universal health coverage – which is much more than just provision of health services – have become very much accepted as basic services and rights that citizens needed access to.

Dr Sania Nishtar, president of Heartfile in Pakistan, said health was not only a rights issue that was enshrined in the constitutions of 119 countries, but had become a “high-profile” matter. Putting it more bluntly, Chan called health an electoral issue: “Politicians who do not talk about health won’t get votes.”

Since the early 1990s, when the WHO began talking about universal health coverage, Nishtar said, health has been redefined drastically and gained a “political momentum” never seen before.

This can be seen, for instance, in the debates in the U.S. electoral campaign over access to healthcare.

In short, winds of change are sweeping across the world, in countries big and small that are turning to or aspiring for a system that allows access to medical treatment to those who cannot afford it. There is a broad consensus among nations, says World Health Organisation (WHO) director general Margaret Chan, that “it is the right thing to do – politically, economically and socially”.

Since the WHO developed a health financing system in 2010, one that is capable of sustaining universal coverage, 80 countries have already sought guidance from it.

Using Japan as an example of a country that has put health on top of all social priorities, Keizo Takemi, senior fellow at the Japan Centre for International Exchange, said universal health coverage helped reduce poverty by helping bring social, economic and political stability.

With people living longer, lower infant mortality and an ageing population, the demand for healthcare here in Japan has taken a whole different hue.

Globally, 20 to 40 percent of resources spent on health are wasted.

Common causes of inefficiencies include de-motivated health workers, duplication of services, and inappropriate or overuse of medicines and technologies. In 2008 for example, France saved almost 2 billion dollars by using generic medicines wherever possible.

From the viewpoint of developing countries, however, resource challenges make it harder to aim for universal health coverage.

“Juggle, juggle, juggle,” is what Maria Kiwanuka, Uganda’s finance minister, has to do every single day in order to manage finite resources to deal with “ignorance, poverty and health”.

Grappling with high population growth, disease and poverty, against a backdrop of falling aid funds, she explained the endless debate that goes on within Ugandan government circles. “Do you spend on infrastructure provision or do you spend on salaries on the health sector?” she asked. Are roads, bridges, irrigation, electricity more important or is setting up a basic health facility more urgent, and how do you ensure a steady supply of drugs and a health provider to run that?

To her mind, investing in health means a “long-term” commitment with “high initial cost”, so the challenge is to find a way shift some of the healthcare responsibility from the shoulder of governments to the people. One idea is to make people contribute through taxation and/or insurance, to a pool of health funds, where the cost is shared by all.

But what Kiwanuka fails to mention is the miniscule share that many developing-country governments’ budgets have set aside for health.

According to the WHO, every year 100 million people are pushed into poverty because they have to pay for health services directly.

There are however also examples of formulas that may work in the developing world. Thailand has moved away from a system funded largely by out-of-pocket payments to one funded by prepaid funds – a mix of taxes and insurance contributions. In Kyrgyzstan, the pooling of general revenues with insurance payroll taxes has helped improve access to healthcare.

In addition, countries can consider introducing ‘sin taxes’ on the sale of tobacco and alcohol. Ghana funded its national health insurance partly by increasing its value-added tax by 2.5 percent. (END/ZTE/JS/TV/IPSAP)

TOKYO, Oct 12 (TerraViva) – Call it a flipside of South-east Asia’s robust economic growth: Its economies are churning out healthy growth rates, but this rapid development is also eating into its food security. 

This key finding – in a study conducted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) on agricultural transformation and food security among the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries  – was discussed in a seminar around the IMF-WB Annual Meetings here in the Japanese capital.

Despite years of healthy GDP growth figures – regional growth has been 5 percent annually since 1980 and has been outpacing global growth —  JICA senior vice president Hideaki Domichi said that food security remains a serious concern in many countries.

This is the case of countries like Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, which were the focus on the study.

“ASEAN countries are demonstrating strong economic growth and the population increase, but at the same time, they are losing agricultural land due to urbanisation,” said JICA senior vice president Hideaki Domichi.

Harinder Kohli, research team leader for the JICA study, said that from 1980 to 2011, even with healthy agricultural growth, agriculture’s share of GDP in ASEAN dropped from 21percent to 10 percent.

“As it stands right now, 850 million people (in the world) are malnourished. But a record-breaking drought would cause even further damage to the food supply throughout the world,” he added.

“And unfortunately, food crises have the largest impact on the poor. We have already witnessed social unrest around the world due to food price hikes and shortages,” Kohli added.

He cited the example of the Philippines, which, although it has large food supplies and rich natural resources, is now the largest importer of rice.

The same study stated that paddy production has grown fastest in Vietnam, making it world’s second largest exporter of rice. Indonesia is net rice importer, and Philippines is no longer the rice exporter it used to be.

From 1980 to 2011, Indonesia and Vietnam were major agricultural exporters. Agricultural production in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines grew steadily between 2-4 percent and were highest in Vietnam and Indonesia.

This growth in Vietnam and Indonesia is driven by total factor productivity (above 1.5 percent), but not in the Philippines.

Dang Kim Son, director general of Institute Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development in Vietnam, said his government puts farmers in the “top hierarchy”.

For her part, Armida Alisjahbana, state minister of National Development Planning and Chairperson of the National Planning Agency in Indonesia, acknowledged that the rice paddy in term of productivity in her country remains very low at less than one percent.

“Certainly, it is less than the growth of our population, which has been around 1.5 percent for the past ten years,” she added.

Arsenio Balisacan, secretary of socio-economic planning and director general of National Economic Development Authority in Philippines, was less ready to agree with the findings of the JICA study. He pointed out that it still lacked some data, such as that of the size of plantation lands and information from the local level in his country. (END/SR/TV/IPSAP/JS)