India today stressed a new development agenda based on social justice and voluntary standards, at the World Bank annual conference on development economics.
Delivering the keynote address at the conference in Oslo, commerce and industry minister Murasoli Maran said that developing countries needed more time for preparation and more resources for adjustment. However, international institutions showed little sympathy for political concerns in the developing world, he said.
Maran said the principles of democracy that made governments accountable to the public must be an integral part of the development paradigm.
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While the role of steel workers or any group of workers in elections was understandable, the fact remained that democracy existed across the developing world, and voters had equal concerns about the jobs that would vanish as a result of liberalisation,
Maran said. If any impression was created by multilateral institutions that they were taking over the role of Parliaments of sovereign countries and becoming a global government, it might prove to be counter-productive and lead to political backlash, he added.
"The global economic order will not work for the North unless it also works for the South," he said, adding that instead of reshaping the world as per terms set by the North, it would be better to have a world order on the basis of social justice and voluntary standards. Viewing globalisation as an unchanging set of strategies in the name of development would not generate public support because it produced losers without any immediate alternatives, the minister said. Therefore, any move that would dismantle or weaken the welfare state concept without providing sufficient and necessary alternative, needed to be approached after considering the dangerous consequences they were likely to lead to, he added.
Increasingly, the South was realising the benefits of trade, while the North was entering into a shell of protectionism for one reason or other, Maran said. He further said the North was consciously raising non-tariff barriers which cost developing countries $100 billion a year, twice as much as received in aid. Maran expressed concern over the adoption of the Farm Bill by the US, which proposed to increase subsidies to farmers. This was on top of the $1 billion a day subsidy given by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries that enabled them to export at prices less than two-thirds of the cost of production.
Developing countries were disappointed that these measures had been imposed soon after the Doha declaration, Maran said. "Just because the word 'development' figures in more than 70 places, it cannot transform the Doha declaration into what is widely acclaimed as the Doha development agenda," he added.
"It is more important to enable countries to build up the wherewithal to take decisions based on merits and respective national interests, and to be able to implement their commitments. Capacity building and technical assistance will become meaningful only when backed by sufficient and necessary resources for their implementation," the Minister said.