Two decades on
Mohamed Hakki finds reasons to be cheerful in a new book outlining the potentials, as well as the pitfalls, of globalisation
No subject evokes more passionate discussion throughout the developing world as globalisation. Thankfully, though, we now have a book that offers a fresh look at the problems facing the world in the coming 20 years without banging the globalisation drum. In fact, its author, J F Rischard, says he initially had his heart set on the title "It's not Globalisation Stupid."
Rischard, the World Bank vice-president for Europe, told me that he deliberately chose not to have his book associated with the World Bank in any way. It has already sold 20,000 copies in the US and has been translated into several languages. It appeared under the title "High Noon", "after Gary Cooper's Western movie in which a tense community anxiously awaits a showdown set for noon while the clock ticks off minutes that are both long and terribly short."
It reminded me of other books that, if not quite in the same genre, at least tried to gaze into the future with facts and figures rather than a crystal ball. I think here of "The Year Two Thousand", written 35 years ago by Herman Kahn, and "Commanding Heights", a more recent book by Daniel Yargin.
Rischard's book is rather like the huge brass gong that used to announce Rank films -- it serves as a wake up call. He goes straight to the problems facing the world like a laser beam and analyses them with a clarity and simplicity that makes the book unputdownable.
His advice is to forget about globalisation. Instead of one shapeless force, think of two big forces that will produce spectacular changes over the next 20 years: a sizable population increase on an already over-stretched planet, and the intensely different world economy that is emerging.
In facing these problems traditional thinking will no longer suffice. Nation states are struggling. International institutions are in the doghouse. Politicians, with their short electoral horizons, aren't about to produce solutions to urgent global issues.
When I asked him specifically about the Arab world, his observation was that it is in deep denial. An enormous amount of time is wasted on meetings and banal discussions that simply go around in circles. He says the demographic explosion brings only stress. The emerging economy, on the other hand, brings a mixture of stresses and opportunities. It is these opportunities the Arab world must grasp. The Arab world, he believes, needs to create one million jobs by the year 2020 and there are no signs yet that they are on the right track.
Arab leaders share the same problems as most traditional hierarchies. They lack flexibility and are slow to adapt to external changes. Information has a long way to go before it reaches the top. Each layer has some sort of vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Each is reluctant to pass bad news on to the next level. Rules and controls, designed to do their job in stable times, also build in rigidity. When change intensifies the controls become a liability. Leaders at the top, who are supposed to control everything and call the shots, end up swamped in tons of paperwork, memos, reports, and meetings to the extent that they are left with no time for fresh and clear thinking.
The other problem Rischard sees is that the social contract that once existed in the Arab world between governments and the governed has been broken. With the demographic explosion governments are no longer able to deliver what is necessary to keep dissent in check. There is a new reality that has to do with how the public sector, business, and civil society interact: it used to be that each side was content to stay in its corner. Businesses did their own thing. Civil society criticised from the outside, and government arrogantly believed it knew best.
Such separation is no longer tenable. Civil society and NGOs are a powerful force. The number of known international NGOs went up from 6,000 in 1990 to 26,000 in 2000. In Eastern Europe more than 100,000 local NGOs have sprung up in a decade.
Thousands of web sites -- instant news services -- have sprung up and are being used to form powerful coalitions between NGOs and other civil social groups. Surveys in the US and Europe show the public trusts civil society far more than government, business or the media.
Rischard sees the positive side of what business can do. He says it is hard to see how the complex problems of the next 20 years can be solved without actively engaging business. Like civil society, large corporations can spread their operations across many countries. He also cautions that whether they are part of the problem or part of the solution, business possesses an advantage in terms of knowledge and means. For example, when Cisco Systems decided to engage the educational field, it leveraged its effort across scores of countries simultaneously. By 2001 157,000 students had enrolled in 6,800 "networking academies" established in a short time in 130 countries. Business will clearly be called upon to contribute to solutions, providing breakthroughs in renewable energy, desalination, new vaccines and drugs, safer banking, more sustainable forestry, etc.
Over the past two decades several large companies have sought to promote a degree of "corporate responsibility". First some established small charity departments. After being attacked by NGOs over labour and environmental practices they created larger corporate responsibility departments, with some even becoming agents of development.
Now some corporations are seriously interested in participating with government and civil society in urgent problem solving that goes far beyond their own fields. And they are doing so not for direct commercial reasons but because, like civil society, they too are beginning to wonder what state the state of the world will be like in ten or 15 years from now.
A world with three billion people in 1960, five billion in 1990, more than six billion now, and eight billion by 2020, is going to face serious problems. Yet Rischard is an incurable optimist who says that, yes it will create unimaginable stresses, but the planet's population growth will either stagnate or reach a plateau of around 9-10 billion in the second half of this century, after which it may decline.
The demographic explosion, which he describes in several chapters, is creating pressures on food, energy, health, forests, fisheries and water. It has resulted in increasing pollution and accentuated the problems associated with poverty, aging and urban migration.
Rischard, though, stresses that the emerging economic dispensation also provides opportunities. There are now nearly 6 billion people living in market economies.
"There are virtually no countries that haven't adopted market-oriented policies by now. Most have lowered their trade barriers, privatized public enterprises, and opened public utilities to competition. They have given markets an increasing say and limited the role of civil servants." He says the only real debate today is about how to balance the basic market oriented approach with this or that regulatory feature or social safety policy.
The other force shaping the world economy is the economic revolution, which is centered on low cost telecommunication and information technologies, with all kinds of side revolutions -- in advanced materials, nano-technology (very small things), robots mimicking or outdoing humans, biotechnology and much else. By 2010 a typical computer will have more than 10 million times the power of a 1975 computer, and will cost much less. Computer grids are being developed to provide computing power on tap, several million times more powerful than the Internet. The World Bank forecasts major declines in telecommunication costs, to maybe 3 cents an hour for a trans-Atlantic telephone call well before 2020. In China, by 2005, there could be 500 million telecommunication lines, with 60 per cent of them mobile, and some 200 million Internet users. In Africa there are more mobile than fixed lines.
The book lists 20 global issues that need immediate attention in the next 20 years. Yes, the list is very ambitious, but he divides it into three sections: sharing our planet, that includes issues like global warming, fisheries depletion, water deficits; sharing our humanity, which includes tackling poverty, peacekeeping, education for all, the digital divide, and sharing our rule book, which examines trade, investment, illegal drugs, intellectual property rights and international labour and migration rules.
The book contains some good news. The rate of absolute poverty -- ie people living on less than $1 a day, fell from 29 per cent of the world's population in 1990 to 23 per cent in 1999. China's 7-8 per cent growth rate in the 1990s enabled it to bring the absolute poor in its territory down from 360 million to 200 million. Even some African countries have made substantial progress -- Cap Verde, Mozambique, Uganda, and Botswana.
For the first time in centuries countries can double or triple their living standards within a single generation. Korea went from a per capita income of $300 to $8,500 in little more than a generation. Countries as diverse as Botswana, Chile and Thailand have doubled their per capita incomes in ten years.
The book is rich with such information. I only hope it will be translated into Arabic.
