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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)

IPS Asia-Pacific’s Suvendrini Kakuchi talked to Noboyuki Idei, president of the Asia Innovators’ Initiative that organised the forum. Idei, a former president of Sony Corp, is CEO of Quantum Leaps Corp.

Q: What’s your understanding and vision of innovation?

Idei: Innovation is now key to growth. In the past, this very important theme had been defined too narrowly. It focused too

Idei

heavily on technology advances for business profit. But the way I see it is that the seeds of innovation are everywhere – in the kitchen, in society and in business etc. Indeed, innovation stems from necessity; it is everywhere – creating at the individual level and at an expanded stage that involves bigger stakeholders. Based on this definition, there is no doubt that innovation is playing a key role in the emerging countries.

In Asia, the needs are growing multiple and complex as their economies grow. Take for instance the rapid urbanisation in those countries. This transformation needs solid infrastructure that calls for quality water, sustainable energy sources and good medical care. This is where Japanese technology can become useful. Japanese cities are extremely efficient and we have a headstart there which we can share with Asia.

Innovation in the 21st century is now concentrated on seeking contributions that can meet the needs of globalisation. I would like to focus on communication innovation as a solution. The Internet has become a huge opportunity for new ways of doing business, easing labour costs and collaboration across countries. Innovative communication is paving the way for rise of small and medium companies into the business playing field.

Q. In this era of growth in Asia, what is the role of Japan?

Idei: The rise of Asia, including China, has achieved remarkable economic achievements. But at the same time they are facing many problems that Japan as a mature nation has already experienced. In fact, as Japan’s economy moves away from its formerly high growth rates, problems are commonly shared – social inequality, ageing populations and heavy public spending are some of the pressing regional issues.

Inclusive growth – a path that can reconcile these problems and now been identified as a way forward – must be dealt with through innovation. Japan does not look for long-term solutions any more as an individual nation, but rather through an Asian regional network. Now is the time for new innovations to be developed on a collective basis and this is where the Asia Innovators’ Initiative is playing a role. The forum aims to be a vital space for the launch of new ideas by Asian innovators who represent the diverse cultures of the region and who bring unique and constructive breakthroughs.

This time, we have had participants working in a vast array of disciplines form new steps to commercialise the next generation’s genomic exploration to fashion. Our project includes an award that rewards young Asian entrepreneurs who are working on important new business projects that will contribute to social well-being.

Q: What is the innovation challenge in Japan that has led to technology development in Asia?

Idei: Japanese technology has focused heavily on developing products to cater to consumer needs. Companies, especially Sony, have brought into the market extremely useful consumer products that are have risen to become respected household brands in Asia and around the world. The challenge we now face is to meet the needs of the Internet society, and that means we have to move away from products and invent in new ways.

Japan’s goal is to create from new experiences that are based on the multiple disciplines that are provided by the Internet. Our new vision is to be innovative, multiply technologies, and that is an exciting future. Japan and Asia are on the path to collaborate and by understanding each other’s culture and history. There is the possibility of new ideas for a new vision for 2020. (END)

TOKYO, Oct 13 – Civil society activists are not  surprised that there has been a reversal in some countries in progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), because they say it was based on flawed premises to begin with.

Many poor countries are facing a challenge in meeting the goals on poverty, nutrition, health and education because of falling incomes due to inflation, the global recession and climate change. All three causes are linked to neo-liberal values and marketisation that have driven growth and globalisation, they say.

The roots of the crisis are all interlinked: Unsustainable growth based on petro-based economies led to global warming, which resulted in the increased frequency of droughts. This reduced food production, so countries tried to reduce their carbon footprints by turning to bio-fuels which in turn put additional inflationary pressure, and volatility in food prices hit vulnerable populations in poor countries hardest. This meant parents send their children to work in the fields instead of sending them to school. Which, in turn, resulted in countries regressing in efforts to meet their primary-school enrollment MDG targets.

Speakers at a seminar on ‘From MDG1 to Inclusive Economy’, organised at the sidelines of the World Bank-IMF meeting in Tokyo this week, felt that international development organisations have finally seen that the growth models they were pushing were not sustainable, but still don’t dare to make a paradigm shift.

China has often been cited as a country that has been the most successful in world history in reducing poverty. In fact, China has already met most of its MDG targets, including over-achieving the goal to reduce extreme poverty by slashing it from 85 million to 35 million between 2000 to 2009.

While admitting that progress has been made, activists say, the Chinese model masks a widening gap between the rich and poor, huge out-migration from rural areas, a big problem with water and air pollution, glacier retreat in Tibet because of the impact of China’s growth on the global climate. China’s e-waste is exported around the world, and its demand for wildlife products has decimated national parks and oceans. Arable land is decreasing, and the use of chemical fertilisers has destroyed existing farms.

Lau Kin Chi is a professor at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, and the author of books, including ‘China Reflected’. She said: “China may have reduced poverty, but its development model has increased inequality and exacerbated environmental problems.”

“Inclusive growth” is a term being used in World Bank-IMF documents, and activists fear it will become a buzzword like “green growth”. The jargon doesn’t mean anything until economic justice, sustainability and the environment are taken into account.

“China’s growth model produces poverty. We need to redefine what we mean by growth and progress,” Ki Chi said.

To be sure, at a stock-taking of the MDG targets at a Saturday panel discussion, the World Bank’s new president Jim Yong Kim said that a post-2015 goal had to take into account inclusive and equitable development.

India and China took different roads to spur economic growth, and they are also taking different paths to poverty eradication. While China has increased outlays for social welfare, environmental cleanup and promoting green technology, it still faces huge social problems with managing the expectations of its disenfranchised.

The Indian government has been even slower in addressing equitable growth, and today is numerically the world’s poorest country. There are 2 million NGOs in India and they were all doing piecemeal work, but lately they have taken a collective rights-based approach to work with parliament to legislate the right to health, education, jobs.

The most successful example of this is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) which, since it went into effect in 2006, has improved the purchasing power of rural people, a third of them women. It has cut down on rural-urban migration by creating jobs in conservation, water supply, forestry all over the vast country and benefited 80 million households.

“India has shown that social movements can force a national parliament to act to look at poverty reduction holistically,” explained Vinod Raina, of the All India People’s Science Network. Combined with right to health and education, it provides income, decreases inequality and people can keeping living in their own areas keeping their ties to the land. Such holistic programmes will have far-reaching impact on India meeting MDG targets.

Japanese civil society activist Masaaki Ohashi of the Japan NGO Centre for International Cooperation (JANIC) summed it all up: “In the 1970s, the Rome Report showed us the limits to growth. We are now seeing it happen all over the planet through climate change, and proof that poverty comes from excess.”

*Dateline Earth is a column written by Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of ‘The Nepali Times’, during this TerraViva edition.

(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)

But not in Tokyo. There was a small protest of 300 people holding placards, and not shouting very loudly, which didn’t even try to defy the security cordon around the Tokyo International Forum, where the meetings are being held. But compared to Istanbul and other venues before this, it was a joke.

“How come you aren’t out on the streets protesting?” one activist asked Masaki Inaba, a Japanese civil society leader at one of the officially sanctioned meetings inside the Forum complex.

Inaba explained how it was difficult to get the Japanese people mobilised against neo-liberalism because of their lack of awareness. “But it is also important to lobby and try to reform the organisations from within,” added Inaba, the Director of the Africa Japan Forum.

It could also be because of the conformist culture in Japan and the desire for order and harmony. There is also a need, activists felt, for civil society to sharpen its arguments and the best way to do that is to engage in dialogue with the institutions that need to be reformed – and that is more effective than stoning shop windows.

TOKYO, Oct 13 (TerraViva) – After a decade of progress, it had seemed that the world was on target to meet many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were set in 2000 to halve extreme poverty and hunger, boost health and literacy in 15 years.

But the global finance and food crisis have threatened to reverse gains.

For the first time in many years, hunger worldwide is increasing instead of decreasing – mainly because of the widespread drought this summer and the increasing use of farmlands for the production of biofuels. Food prices have soared to all-time highs, affecting vulnerable populations in poor countries the most.

And all this is coinciding with the global economic crisis, which has affected aid flows and investment in developing countries, undermining their capacity to cope with the crisis of inflation, food security and development.

With three years to go before the target date, the United Nations is now trying to come up with new goals for beyond 2015 that will draw lessons from the current MDG campaign, and look at the new challenges that have come up since 2000.

In September, the UN set up a High-level Panel post-2015 Task Team that UNDP Administrator Helen Clark says will look at the new development landscape and look at new areas not tackled in the current goals, like equality, inclusiveness, sustainability, conflict and climate change.

Clark was speaking at a panel at the World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings in Tokyo this week with the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution, who is the lead author of the High-level Panel, and its other members, including Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Gunilla Carlsson, Sweden’s Foreign Minister.

Most panelists agreed that the world had changed dramatically since 2000. It had become much more interconnected, and the new goals should not just be goals for developing countries but for the whole world. The global financial crisis was worsening inequality, global climate change was affecting food security, and there was a danger that there would be a reversal of even the MDG goals that had been attained so far.

The High-level Panel has its work cut out to be able to present its report to the UN Secretary-General by end-May 2013. And its main challenge will be to ensure that new post-MDG goals, whatever they are, also have the ability to absorb global financial, climate and natural shocks. This would mean that poor countries should not just be trying to lift their populations out of poverty, but also develop “shock absorbers” and social stabilisers to deal with them.

World Bank President Kim weighed in with his own priorities for the post-MDG plan: to look beyond just GDP growth, pay more attention to equity and inclusion, and give special attention to fragile and conflict states.  While the 2015 target called for halving extreme poverty, Kim is now on a campaign to put international development organisations to agree to an ambitious campaign to eradicate extreme poverty altogether by 2030.

However, to really go to the heart of the reasons why some countries have lagged behind on meeting MDG targets and not others, some basic questions need to be asked not, just about what areas they lag behind in, but also why.

One key issue is that while targets are global, meeting them is a local matter that hinges on governance, leadership, accountability and transparency. These are generally beyond the purview of the United Nations, international creditors or aid agencies.

Sometimes, countries make progress despite conflict and political disarray. Nepal, for example, has met most of its MDG targets ahead of schedule, more than halving maternal and child mortality, doubling female literacy and reducing extreme poverty despite a 10-year conflict, bad governance, endemic corruption and government mismanagement.

The MDGs have worked because they have packaged development goals neatly into targets that are easy to explain and monitor. They have also galvanised the UN, governments and donors to row in the same direction.

However, while MDGs quantify progress, they don’t answer questions about the structural international and domestic factors that keep countries poor.

Not many of donor countries that once pledged to set aside 0.7 percent of their GDP for ODA have met their target, for instance. Also, there has been a net outflow of resources from poor countries to rich. Most developing countries pay more in debt servicing and imports to advanced countries than they receive in aid or remittances. As someone said, trying to achieve MDGs in a situation like this is like trying to go up in a down escalator.

The Tokyo meetings this week were a venue for the new World Bank President to give himself and his Bank the challenge to eradicate poverty in the next 15 years after 2015. In numerous speeches he made here, he kept asking “what will it take” to achieve that goal, and his staff distributed black t-shirts that said ‘End Poverty’ and the Bank even has a twitter hashtag, #whatwillittake.

Said Kim: “It is time to move from dreaming of a world free of poverty to achieving it. It is time to bend the arc of history.”

In the final analysis, whatever the global goals, it will ultimately come down to improving local governance through accountable leadership. That is the way all countries that have made progress have done so. Maybe the hashtag should be: #whyisittakingsolong? (END)

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.