What's liberal, again?
The Economist takes a liberal, free-market stance on economic and political issues, but even the editors there recognize limitations of the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal survey of "Freedom of the World."The Economist analysis would be a good article to use with students when introducing economic restructuring. It's even better for teaching critical thinking. There are many important concepts in this little essay (e.g. liberal, liberalisation, freedom, monetary, fiscal, rights) and lots of logical connections (e.g. "To close the gap with high- and middle-income countries, they must do more.").
What assumptions can your students recognize? What limitations on those assumptions can they describe? What critiques do The Economist editors make of the survey? Are the critiques substantial? Are they substantiated? What would Nigerian, Mexican, Russian, or Iranian officials say about this survey. Would those opinions be better grounded in empirical data than the survey results? And what about political culture? Does the survey take local political culture into account? Should it?
Not liberal enough: African economies suffer from a lack of liberalisation
"Claims by some donor groups and international lenders notwithstanding, African countries have made negligible progress liberalising their economies in recent years. To close the gap with high- and middle-income countries, they must do more.
"Liberalisation of African economies in recent years has been overstated, according to the 2008 Freedom of the World report published by a US-based think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, and the Wall Street Journal. While the average economic freedom index improved some 5.7% between its launch in 1996 and 2004—the peak year for Africa—little progress has been apparent in the past four years...
"[In the survey] countries are assessed in terms of ten freedoms, with index scores out of 100. Africa’s lowest scores are for corruption and property rights, while its economies are most free in terms of the size of government, and monetary and fiscal freedom. Nonetheless, only six African countries rank in the free, mostly free and moderately free categories, while just over half the world’s mostly unfree economies are in Africa—as are nine of the world’s 24 repressed states.
"Freedom matters, the Heritage Foundation says, because there is a very strong correlation between the level of economic freedom and the prosperity of the people... Equally, inflation rates tend to rise as economic freedom falls...
"This underscores that fact that the correlation between economic freedom and income per head tends to break down in resource-rich states...
"[T]he report is gloomy about overall Sub-Saharan prospects, noting that the region ranks last in eight of the ten economic freedoms. Ironically, the single freedom for which the region scores higher than the world average—size of government—is more a reflection of weakness than strength..."
Labels: concepts, economics, political culture, politics
posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home