Globalisation sans social welfare is counter-productive: Amartya Sen

NEW YORK: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said on Thursday that globalisation could be a major force for prosperity only if it was backed by adequate national policies in a conducive social and economic environment.

Addressing his first news conference after winning the Nobel Prize on Wednesday, he stressed that he was not against globalisation and said countries threatened by it were those where human development was very low.

``There are major gains to be made in globalisation. So I am pro-globalisation,'' he said. But, he added, if a country has globalisation at the highest possible speed and pays no attention to lack of social opportunity, illiteracy and lack of health care, it was creating problems for itself.

In that case, the blame, he stressed, lies not with globalisation but with concomitant policies with which it was being married. Globalisation needs to be put in a broader context of social and economic policies, Prof Sen added. He suggested a ``social safety net,'' as in the industrial countries of Western Europe, to take care of the people when things go wrong for one reason or another.

Prof Sen said India and Pakistan had opened up their economies suddenly, resulting in a ``lot of people'' from these countries not being able to compete in the global world. India and Pakistan, he pointed out, had neglected education, health care and land reforms in a truly regrettable way. ``The problems arise when people in the countries enjoying protective environment are suddenly pushed into a highly-competitive situation,'' the first Asian to win the coveted prize for economics said.

``And when they opened economies suddenly, there were a lot of people who were not in a position to compete in a global world,'' Prof Sen said.

In India, he added, the government had been active in intervening in industry which proved counter-productive while it was inactive in education and health. ``It is not a question of more or less government but what kind of government,'' he said.

Referring to the prosperity enjoyed by South-East Asian countries compared to the Indian continent, Prof Sen said it was fashionable to say that the reason was that they (South-East Asian countries) had opened up their markets.

One of the reasons for people suffering in Indonesia was that it had no social safety net when financial crisis hit, though the country had done well on human development and growth rate, Prof Sen added. ``A whole lot of people were actually thrown to the wolves when the financial crisis hit.''

To compete in the world, he said, land reforms and microcredit are positive factors. ``To make things according to specification, literacy is needed and for raising some capital, microcredit is important,'' he added.

A democratic government and free Press are very important for preventing recurring famines, which may not always be because of food shortages, he said. He referred to the fact that India did not have any famine after the 1943 Bengal famine but China had a major one between 1958 and 1962 during which on an average a million people died each year. This was despite the fact that China was economically doing much better than India. Besides, Beijing had developed a system of food distribution, public health care and was expanding education at a much faster pace than India, he said. But, what failed China was lack of good information system - absence of free Press, opposition parties and free elections, he added. So at the height of famine, China thought it had 100 million tonne more food than the country's actual stocks. All this happened because there was no coordination between different regions of China.

Prof Sen said democracy was best suited to avert famines since governments would come under pressure from the media and the Opposition to solve the problem. But dictatorships feel no such compulsions, he added.(PTI)