I recently had the chance to participate in a series of
debates here about this issue organized by Foreign Policy magazine and Letras
Libres, a Mexican cultural publication. Nothing I heard at that meeting changed
my conviction that the glass is half-full despite the doomsayers who predict
horrific calamities.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, poverty has been
significantly reduced throughout the world. Two hundred years ago, the average
income per person worldwide was the equivalent of less than $2 a day; the
figure is $17 today. This fact is relevant to the current discussion on
globalization because, even though the information technology revolution,
biotechnology, the emergence of new world players and outsourcing may give us
the impression that we are in the midst of something entirely new, we are
simply witnessing a new phase in the process of innovation that is the market
economy -- and this began a few hundred years ago.
The fact that 20 percent of the world's population is
extremely poor should not make us forget that millions of lives have improved
dramatically in the last three decades. Illiteracy has dropped from 44 percent
to 18 percent, and only three countries out of a total of 102 included in the
U.N.'s Human Development Index have seen their socioeconomic conditions
deteriorate. China's
economy used to represent one-26th of the average economy of the countries that
comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; today it
represents one-sixth.
These are not arcane facts. They are widely available and
easy to understand. Publications such as Indur Goklany's "The Improving
State of the World," David Dollar and Aart Kraay's report on the global
economy, and Francois Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson's "Inequality
Among World Citizens" -- to mention but three among many recent studies --
provide overwhelming evidence that the world is better off thanks to the
increased flow of capital, goods, services and ideas.
All of which falls on the face of those who predict that in the next few years we will see a massive concentration of wealth among a few winners who will leave millions of losers behind. While it is probably true that the gap between low-skilled workers and those who are better educated will mean that different people will be impacted in very different ways by the continuing evolution of the global economy, the reality is that even those on the bottom rungs stand to benefit from the worldwide embrace of globalization.
Poverty was the natural condition of all of humanity until
the market economy opened up the possibility of ever-increasing productivity.
By 2030, it is estimated that the average wealth of developing countries will
be equivalent to that of the Czech
Republic today ($22,000 per person). The
World Bank's recent "Global Economic Prospects" report goes as far as
to say that Mexico, Turkey and China
will equal Spain's
current state of development, which is high.
At the recent meeting in Monterrey,
those who were trying to justify their phobia against globalization pointed to Cuba and Venezuela
as paradigms of development, and to Mexico's poor in claiming that
increased trade -- through the North American Free Trade Agreement --
shortchanges the masses.
In 1953, Cuba's
wealth was comparable to that of the state of Mississippi; today, the island's exports
total one-third of the sales of Bacardi rum products, the economic icon of the
Cuban exile community. Venezuela's
economic system is a classic case of state capitalism based on oil -- exactly
what made that nation's per-capita income go from representing the equivalent
of two-thirds of that of the United
States in the 1950s to representing barely
15 percent today. And Mexico's
slums are not a factor of that country's increased trade with its North
American neighbors, which has quadrupled in the last 15 years, but of the slow
pace of reform.
The world was not rich and suddenly turned poor. The progress of the market economy that began to free the world of its shackles continues at an even faster pace today despite the many restrictions still faced by the people who create wealth and exchange it, and despite the fears that these momentous times understandably inspire in those who have difficulty adapting. What a heartening thought.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of "Liberty
for Latin America," is the director of
the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute. His e-mail
address is AVLlosa(at)independent.org.
(c) 2007, The Washington Post Writers Group
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa