Corruption breeds poverty. That is the conclusion of the latest World Development Report, in which the World Bank cites "evidence that higher levels of corruption are associated with lower per capita income" (World Bank, 2002). The story told is that bribes raise the costs of doing business, so more corrupt countries attract less foreign direct investment, which lowers growth rates and per capita incomes.
According to the Keynesian magic formula, writes Frank Shostak, government spending is all that is needed to make a society prosperous. Even today this position has prominent defenders, such as Joseph Stiglitz. If this view were correct, however, poverty in the world would have been eliminated a long time ago.
The burdens imposed upon producers by easy money and their consequent lack of profitability are among the main reasons why there is no significant capital expenditure. The overhang from the 2000 capital-spending boom only partly exacerbates this, since much of the outlay undertaken then was wastefully misallocated and is not germane to the needs of the current economy anyway.
Despite the global changes since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s leadership continues to bank on a centrally planned economy as a viable way into the future and to maintain that it is not the inefficiency of the socialist system but primarily the U.S.-American blockade that is the prime culprit in creating Cuba's economic problems.
The Swedes, we have been told, enjoy free medical care, generous welfare benefits, time off from work, and subsidies for just about everything. According to a recent study, however, the cat is out of the bag: relative to families in the United States, Swedish family income is considerably less.
Ask farmers in China, and they will tell you that the really bad apples don't come from Washington state. The bad apples come from Washington, D.C. That's because, just as with steel, our government recently imposed rules designed to drive out foreign apple producers. J.C. Robbins explains.
Free trade is premised on the idea that human relationships should be voluntary and based on mutual consent. It is grounded on the understanding that the material, cultural, and spiritual improvements in the circumstances and conditions of man are best served when the members of the global community of mankind specialize their activities in a world-encompassing social system of division of labor.
Robert Kaplan's newest book seems to be, bottom line, a briefing book to justify the switches and turns, contradictions, and conflicting rationales for American foreign policy and the domestic political control to which it is tightly bound, while freeing the government to to do anything it wants, anywhere in the world it wants.
As with all economic calamities, pundits will find some way to blame the meltdown and collapse of Argentina on capitalism, deregulation, or the private sector generally. Such nonsense. This crisis is a product of government incompetence, made to order by the IMF, the Argentine political leadership, and the US. As a reminder that the choice of economic policy isn’t politically trivial, the government’s errors ended in hunger, bloodshed, and the resignation (and narrow escape) of the country’s president.
As the history of America's Great Depression is one long regret of political follies and blunders that aggravated the suffering, so is the story of the Japanese recession from the 1990s to the present. The Japanese government tried to spend its way out of the recession, but instead merely prolonged it and created a mountain of debt.
