PETALING JAYA: Renowned economist Dr. Jomo Kwame Sundaram believes that financial liberalisation is not the way to go as it has been proven to have little or no effect on economic growth.
Delivering a lecture entitled “When will we ever learn? Has Malaysia learnt the correct lessons from past crises?” he said financial liberalisation had caused a “bleeding of resources from poor to rich countries.”
Dr Jomo, who is the Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development in the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, said it would be wrong to credit financial liberalisation for the Malaysian boom in the years before the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
That success was due to palm oil, he maintained.
“Though palm oil could not penetrate Western markets, it did penetrate other markets such as China, India and the Middle East.”
Harking back to the crisis years, he agreed with critics of the International Monetary Fund that it was worng for the latter to impose policy conditionalities for aid.
However, he added, much of the criticism was personalized for political reasons and had since given way to further financial liberalisation.
Since then, it had again been proven that financial liberalisation failed to bring about development, he said.
Instead, it bled out the capital resources of Third World countries. “Half of the capital inflows in the year 2007 went to the US due to financial liberalisation.” he said.
Malaysia, he added, had failed to learn from her successes and failures.
Dr Jomo’s free lecture was organised by the Strategic Information and Research
Development Centre and Youth for Change.
FMT
19/12/09
Delivering a lecture entitled “When will we ever learn? Has Malaysia learnt the correct lessons from past crises?” he said financial liberalisation had caused a “bleeding of resources from poor to rich countries.”
Dr Jomo, who is the Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development in the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, said it would be wrong to credit financial liberalisation for the Malaysian boom in the years before the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
That success was due to palm oil, he maintained.
“Though palm oil could not penetrate Western markets, it did penetrate other markets such as China, India and the Middle East.”
Harking back to the crisis years, he agreed with critics of the International Monetary Fund that it was worng for the latter to impose policy conditionalities for aid.
However, he added, much of the criticism was personalized for political reasons and had since given way to further financial liberalisation.
Since then, it had again been proven that financial liberalisation failed to bring about development, he said.
Instead, it bled out the capital resources of Third World countries. “Half of the capital inflows in the year 2007 went to the US due to financial liberalisation.” he said.
Malaysia, he added, had failed to learn from her successes and failures.
Dr Jomo’s free lecture was organised by the Strategic Information and Research
Development Centre and Youth for Change.
FMT
19/12/09
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