Time to scratch each other’s backs

Do you remember the ‘no-driving day’ in Venezuela? Somebody’s brilliant idea to ease congestion! Depending on your license plate number, there was one day a week when you couldn’t drive your car. Even if the idea had worked, I still would never have liked it because, as traffic kept growing, logic would lead us towards a blind alley as—inevitably—the next step would be two no-driving days, then three, all the way up to seven, when everything comes to a complete standstill. It’s rather like applauding the fact that a patient’s breathing problems have ceased—because the patient died. 

There’s a hint of all coming to a standstill in the theory about how globalization will optimize the world economy, by ensuring that merchandise will always be produced at the lowest marginal cost. What good does it do us to have products where the cost of the labor component gets smaller by the minute, if workers can’t buy the very products they produce?

What could be waiting for us at the end of that tunnel is a world of desperate wage earners, willing to work for pennies, who might never be able to afford even a reasonable part of the fruit of their efforts. Doesn’t it seem as if we’re getting nowhere?

This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if there were more jobs than workers, but unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Just ask the millions of professionals competing for jobs as taxi drivers in the world’s capital cities! Not even the United States has managed to escape unharmed from the pangs of globalization. In fact, over the past few months, for the first time, we have seen economic growth in the United States coupled with an increase in unemployment. As it turns out, over the past three years, the United States has “exported” 2.5 million jobs to low-wage countries like China.

I don’t have a solution. How can we increase profits, create jobs, increase wages, put an end to poverty, and make everybody happy? Nonetheless, sometimes I’ve toyed with the idea of a macro global fiscal reform aimed at creating jobs. The principle behind it would be that whoever requires the most services ends up creating the most jobs, and so should end up paying the least taxes. Under such a system, you’d pay double sales taxes on a frozen pizza you eat at home; standard sales tax on a pizza you order over the phone for home delivery, while a pizza eaten at a restaurant wouldn’t just be tax free; it would automatically be credited on your income-tax return. 

Friends, let’s give one another jobs, scratching each other’s backs—paying each other good salaries of course.

From El Universal, Caracas, August, 2003

Family Remittances

In recent publications of the World Bank and other multilateral organizations, there has been emphasis on the significance of family remittances for many developing countries, such as El Salvador, where these remittances reached $1,900 million dollars in 2001. This phenomenon has many bankers scrambled, trying to find out ways to attract part of the financial gains that such an influx represents, ranging from transfer services to the issuance of bonds backed by the projections of future remittances.

Likewise, they are studying the impact on a poor country when hundreds of thousands of its workers could be sent to developed countries on a temporary visa, where they could have access to greater remunerations which could even have a greater economic potential than the long-promised agricultural openness and liberalization.

After allowing their markets to be captured by external suppliers, after allowing free flow of resources, after forcing themselves to respect foreign income sources, such as intellectual property rights and patents, and finally, after many of its educated professionals have been captured by better economic gains somewhere else, poor countries, it would seem, have all the reasons to request greater access to global markets for their unskilled workforce.

Nevertheless, during our technical discussions, we should not forget the human aspect of migration, with the enormous incurred sacrifices and the generosity with which immigrants share their income with family members who were left behind. It has been more than 150 years since big groups of Europeans had to emigrate due to famine in their countries, among other reasons. They left their homes knowing that they would not see their parents, siblings, and everything they had known and cherished in their life. Even though today’s emigrants have in general greater possibilities of returning to their home countries, their vicissitudes are not necessarily negligible, since they are frequently victims of rejection and marginalization.

In this sense, all that is left to do is to stand in awe while observing the significant amount of transfers that Salvadorian emigrants, among many others, send to their homes nowadays. These are only one example of family values, traditions, and solidarity that our countries still possess. They might be poor in monetary terms, but thank God these countries are rich in human, family values.

From El Universal, Caracas, August 2003 

http://theamericanunion.blogspot.com/2003/08/family-remittances.html