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crisis paper
A very insightful analysis of analyses of the East Asian crisis, by
Professors Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett. This cannot be cited in
any written work without prior permission of the authors.
Robert Weissman
Essential Information | Internet: rob@essential.org
From: ECUSERS <ECBURKE@scifac.indstate.edu>
Mainstream Responses to the East Asian Crisis:
A Radical Interpretation
by
Martin Hart-Landsberg*
and
Paul Burkett**
April 1998
*Department of Economics, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR, 97219,
USA.
**Department of Economics, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN,
47809, USA. The 1997-98 economic collapse of Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia,
and South Korea came as a shock not only to government and business
leaders, but also to development economists. Even after the assault
on Asian currencies moved into full swing in mid-1997, the Asian
Development Bank's chief economist still predicted that "these
economies should be growing again at a fair clip in the second half of
1998 and thereafter." [1] The end of the year, however, found the
economies of Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea in a
tailspin, with all relevant economic and social indicators in sharp
decline. [2]
Prior to the crisis, mainstream discussions of the East Asian
economic experience had largely been limited to a debate over the
nature of the forces underpinning the region's rapid growth. Two
perspectives dominated this debate. The most prevalent view, which we
call neoliberalism, was championed by the IMF, the World Bank, and the
U.S. government. This view credited East Asia's economic success to
fiscal and monetary discipline, a willingness to allow domestic
resources to be allocated along the lines of comparative advantage in
trade, and -- especially in the case of the three Southeast Asian
economies of Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia (SEA-3) -- an openness
to foreign direct investment (FDI). The opposing minority view was
put forward by structural-institutionalist economists who, with
support from some Japanese and other regional government officials,
emphasized the positive role played by activist state policies in
promoting the competitive advantages which neoliberals tended to take
as given. [3]
Despite this disagreement, neoliberals and structural-
institutionalists shared a crucial common ground. Both agreed that
East Asia's economic successes demonstrated that it was possible for
Third World countries to develop within the basic institutions of
global capitalism. In other words, both mainstream perspectives
embraced the ideology, which has become so familiar in the years
following the collapse of the Soviet Union, that "there is no
alternative" (TINA) to capitalism.
We believe that the East Asian crisis has thrown both versions of
mainstream development theory into crisis precisely because it
threatens this shared vision. The chant of "there is no alternative"
increasingly rings hollow, as it becomes clear that the only
alternative offered by capitalism is "discipline" and "stability,"
terms which increasingly carry anti-social, and anti-human
developmental implications. In fact, the East Asian crisis threatens
to echo the "TINA" notion back onto capitalism as: "This is no
alternative!"
Section I of this paper summarizes and Section II criticizes
neoliberal responses to the East Asian crisis. We argue that these
responses contradict pre-crisis accounts of East Asian economic
"successes" while failing to grapple with the true depth of the
problems facing East Asian workers and communities. Sections III and
IV summarize and criticize structural-institutionalism. We argue that
although the structuralist emphasis on the necessity of planning for
development is to be welcomed, the overall usefulness of this approach
is undermined by the endogeneity of liberalization pressures within
the capitalist framework. The concluding section argues that
alternative, socialist development visions have never been more in
tune with the socio-economic and political needs of workers and
communities than they are today. We believe that new approaches to
development based on worker-community empowerment, solidarity, and
social and ecological sustainability, can and must be forged out of
the growing opposition to the marketization of human existence in East
Asia and elsewhere.
I. Neoliberal Responses to the Crisis
Neoliberals usually blame Third World economic problems,
especially balance of payments deficits and currency depreciation, on
overly expansionary macro policies and resulting wage and price
inflation. However, most did not blame the East Asian crisis on such
policies. The simple reason was that the overall stance of fiscal and
monetary policy had not been particularly lax in South Korea and the
SEA-3. In fact, most neoliberals had previously credited East Asian
macro-policy discipline and the resulting macro-stability for the
region's economic success. [4] In addition, any focus on
"overheating" as a cause of the crisis would have drawn undue
attention to the role played by capital inflows -- both portfolio
capital and FDI. Since openness to foreign capital had also been a
key element in neoliberal accounts of East Asian (especially SEA-3)
successes, it is not surprising that most neoliberals were motivated
to refocus their attention elsewhere as the crisis deepened.
Determined to place blame on East Asian policymakers rather than
capitalist market dynamics, conservative neoliberals redirected their
fire away from policy decisions affecting aggregate demand towards
those involving resource allocation. They argued that the primary
cause of the crisis was too much government intervention in economic
activity, leading to misdirected and inefficient investments in both
public and private projects. This intervention, largely made possible
because of government control over bank lending decisions, was said to
have been motivated by misguided state planning efforts and, perhaps
even more importantly, corruption. In this way, the state's
infringement on market forces was linked to East Asia's financial
crises.
Although some conservative neoliberals were willing to concede
that state planning, as supported by state authoritarianism and other
so-called "Asian values," had once played a positive role in East
Asian industrialization, they believed that such interventionism had
now been rendered obsolete by changes in the international economic
and political environment, as well as by the internal development of
the East Asian economies themselves. Prominent among the cited global
economic changes were the globalization of finance, the emergence of
new competitors in the manufactured export-led growth game, and the
end of Cold War insulation of state capitalist development from market
pressures. In terms of the last factor, Meredith Woo-Cumings argued
that the prior successes of South Korea's industrial planning efforts
were crucially dependent on periodic infusions of external aid from
the United States and Japan -- infusions which had papered over the
financial fragility built into the South Korean miracle. Woo-Cumings
even suggested that "throughout the past 30 years the Korean financial
system was vulnerable to exactly the sort of calamity that has now
occurred." [5] In other words, the end of the Cold War spelled the
end of the state capitalist development option.
Left-wing neoliberals, while sharing the conservative goal of
transforming the East Asian miracle countries into open, liberal
political-economies of the "western" (and especially U.S.) variety,
nonetheless had a somewhat different understanding of the crisis.
While conservative neoliberals blamed financial problems mainly on
government meddling in bank lending decisions, left-wing neoliberals
pointed to inadequate regulation and supervision of financial
institutions in an environment of volatile short-term international
capital movements as the root cause of East Asia's problems. This
position was argued most forcefully by Joseph Stiglitz, the World
Bank's chief economist, who observed that, "Inadequate oversight, not
over-regulation, caused [East Asia's economic] problems.
Consequently, our emphasis should not be on deregulation, but on
finding the right regulatory regime to re-establish stability and
confidence." [6]
This emphasis on instabilities from inadequately regulated
financial markets also led left-wing neoliberals to part ways with
their more conservative colleagues over the effectiveness of IMF-
promoted fiscal/monetary austerity. Left-wing neoliberals argued that
since the miracle countries "do not have spendthrift governments, but
rather huge private-sector debt problems, . . . austerity adds to
economic pain without solving the debt problem." [7] It also led them
to a different understanding of the role of corruption in the crisis.
For left-wing neoliberals, corruption figured less as a cause of
insufficient financial liberalization than as a cause and consequence
of inadequate regulation and supervision of financial institutions.
Finally, they also worried more about the unfair distributional
consequences of the IMF-organized bailouts. Paul Krugman, for
example, "wonder[ed] whether it would not have been better to let
South Korea declare a moratorium on foreign debt repayment while it
moved swiftly to cleanse the balance sheets of the banks and
conglomerates." [8]
II. Critique of Neoliberal Responses
There was an unmistakable air of unreality about conservative
neoliberal reactions to the crisis. One reason was that their
explanations for the crisis directly contradicted their prior analyses
of East Asian economic successes. This contradiction was pointed out
by left-wing neoliberals. Jeffrey Sachs, for example, detected "a
touch of the absurd in the unfolding drama, as international money
managers harshly castigated the very same Asian governments they were
praising just months before." [9]
The theoretical and policy limits of the conservative neoliberal
position are perhaps best illustrated by its treatment of corruption.
According to conservative neoliberals, the corruption which brought
East Asian growth to a sudden halt was an outgrowth of East Asia's
authoritarian governments and generally regimented societies. Yet
this authoritarianism, regimentation, and corruption were apparently
validated economically by export markets, FDI, and short-term capital
movements for decades. The main reason was that authoritarianism
helped to repress labor and other popular movements, thereby lowering
(or socializing) the costs of industrial accumulation. Such
repression also ensured support from powerful external actors such as
the U.S. and Japan, both of whom sought regional political stability
and attractive opportunities for their transnational corporations
(TNCs) and financial investors. [10] Although neoliberals did not
want to admit it, there had been solid profit interests behind the
"admiration for authoritarian countries such as Indonesia" held by
"prominent Asian and western business leaders." [11]
Naturally, such authoritarian regimes also provided a congenial
environment for corruption. However, this corruption played a
"positive" economic role insofar as it helped keep ruling coalitions
together, thereby ensuring, especially in South Korea, that industrial
planning decisions were actually carried out. [12] Importantly,
although such corruption was eventually bound to disrupt growth, it
was only after East Asian countries partially liberalized their
financial systems and opened themselves up to short-term capital flows
(at the advice of conservative neoliberal agencies) that financial-
sector corruption began to rage out of control to the point of
seriously disrupting investment and growth. [13] Conservative
neoliberals failed to explain how the funneling of billions of dollars
of external capital into such corrupt systems was consistent with the
purported wisdom and discipline of liberalized markets.
The only real attempts by conservative neoliberals to address the
contradictions between their pre-crisis and post-crisis accounts
involved appeals to changed circumstances which had rendered "Asian
capitalism" and "Asian values" economically obsolete. This meant
admitting that state-interventionism had indeed provided a viable path
towards industrialization and growth in the past, especially in South
Korea, but then noting that things were now different. In short, this
response combined an admission of past neoliberal errors (though this
was rarely openly stated) with an assertion that the former neoliberal
position had actually been ahead of its time. Woo-Cumings' argument
that the success of South Korea's financial planning operations
depended on external support associated with the Cold War -- support
no longer available -- was a clear (and relatively honest) example of
this kind of response. [14] But, these attempts to square pre- and
post-crisis accounts generated their own contradictions. For example,
no matter how positively phrased, they implied the progressive
narrowing of development options in the global capitalist economy.
After all, if South Korea's authoritarian industrialization depended
on special Cold War circumstances, what does this say about the
options now available to other Third World countries?
Left-wing neoliberal explanations of the crisis were also
inadequate. These tended to blame East Asia's problems on a rash of
bad loans caused mainly by inadequate banking regulations and too easy
access to short-term foreign capital. Then, once the crisis began, it
was worsened by contagion effects transmitted through international
money markets. Accordingly, the left-wing neoliberal response to the
crisis included measures to strengthen financial-sector regulatory
regimes and reduce speculative short-term capital movements. FDI and
other long-term capital flows, on the other hand, were still to be
encouraged.
The left-wing neoliberal emphasis on questionable lending
practices, volatile capital movements, and contagion effects came
closer to a critical analysis of the crisis. This approach opened up
such important issues as the role of capital controls in the relative
insulation of China and Taiwan from speculative bubbles and deflation.
Nonetheless, left-wing neoliberals themselves failed to carve out a
viable path beyond conservative TINA-type thinking.
Insofar as the left-wing neoliberals blamed authoritarianism and
corruption for the inadequacies of miracle country financial-sector
regulatory regimes, their analysis is subject to the same criticism
applied to conservative neoliberals. Left-wing neoliberals also
failed to consider whether "sound" prudential regulations might
themselves be contradicted by financial-sector competition and the
need to maintain "confidence" among domestic and external investors.
This possibility seemed all the more plausible given that foreign
investors had willingly poured billions into these imprudently managed
financial systems.
Related to this last point, left-wing neoliberals conveniently
did not ask why so much core-country capital had been available for
short-term investment in the miracle countries and other emerging
markets -- a question which might have forced them to reconsider their
allegiance to capitalist "market forces." The accelerating flows of
core-generated money capital into domestic and Third World
speculation, and the growing weight and even dominance of financial
activity in total core economic activity, had developed despite an
abundance of unmet economic and social needs in the core countries.
Similarly, the movement of huge sums of money capital into speculative
construction and other questionable areas in the miracle countries,
where many workers and communities still lacked access to many basic
goods and services, did not exactly provide convincing testimony to
the wisdom of market processes, at least from a social as opposed to a
purely bottom-line point of view.
Left-wing neoliberalism's dichotomous treatment of short- and
long-term capital flows was also problematic. Short-term capital
inflows were viewed as unstable and thus dangerous; long-term capital
movements were seen as stable and thus desirable. Left-wing
neoliberals therefore encouraged the miracle countries to de-emphasize
short-term capital inflows and encourage long-term capital inflows,
especially FDI which was seen as directly enhancing domestic
productive capabilities. In reality, however, the crisis had already
shown that reliance on FDI carried its own dangers. Rapid FDI inflows
had been a major factor enabling the miracle countries (especially the
SEA-3) to maintain their overvalued exchange rates. Although such
exchange rates had helped keep domestic inflation under control, they
had also increased East Asian vulnerability to speculative attacks.
Moreover, it was the drying up of FDI, largely as a result of
competition from lower wage countries (especially China) and the
mobility of regional investment by Japanese, South Korean, and
Taiwanese companies, that had forced the miracle countries to open
themselves up to heavy short-term capital inflows as a way of
financing their growing trade deficits. Most importantly, these
deficits were themselves largely a function not just of rapid growth
and "overheating" per se, but of the import-dependent structures of
export-oriented production created by Japanese and other TNC
investments in the miracle countries. [15] Here again, the only
answer neoliberalism could offer was that "there was no alternative."
The inability or unwillingness of left-wing neoliberals to move
outside the boundaries of TINA-type thinking was also revealed by
their truncated discussions of the quandaries associated with bail-
outs of miracle country creditors. While expressing alarm about the
regressive distributional consequences of the purely financial aspects
of IMF-U.S. government plans, left-wing neoliberals did not extend
this concern to the regressive nature and limits of export-led growth
itself. They failed to emphasize, for example, how the competitive
"success" of export-led growth had been based on a regressive
socialization of the costs of industrial accumulation in the form of
low hourly wages, long and intensive worktimes, high industrial
accident rates, and super-exploitation of young female workers as well
as serious environmental damages and a plundering of natural
resources. [16]
III. Structural-Institutionalist Responses to the Crisis
As mentioned earlier, structural-institutionalists (hereafter
structuralists), in contrast to neoliberals, emphasized the role of
state intervention and industrial policy in the economic successes of
the miracle countries, especially South Korea and Taiwan. Not
surprisingly, then, structuralist post-crisis writings have focused on
South Korea rather than the SEA-3. The structuralists blamed the
South Korean crisis mainly on the overly rapid liberalization of the
financial sector, especially of loans denominated in foreign currency.
According to Alice Amsden and Yoon-Dae Euh, for example, "it was the
government's decision to allow banks and other financial institutions
to borrow without interference" which had, in combination with an
overzealous anti-inflation policy, "created the current crisis." [17]
Robert Wade and Frank Veneroso took a similar position, arguing that,
"The rush to capital liberalization in the early to mid 1990s without
serious institutional support stands out as the single most
irresponsible act in the whole crisis." [18]
More specifically, structuralists claimed that profligate
borrowing by domestic industrial firms mushroomed as a result of
financial liberalization. The weakening of the government's
commitment to industrial policy enabled manufacturing companies to
make questionable use of both foreign and domestic loans. Even when
the loans were used for productive purposes, the fact that the
government had "abandoned its traditional role of coordinating
investments in large-scale industries . . . allow[ed] excess
capacities to emerge in industries like automobiles, shipbuilding,
steel, petrochemicals and semiconductors," which in turn reinforced
"the fall in export prices and the accumulation of non-performing
loans." As a result: "Not only were companies unable to pay back
their foreign loans, but they couldn't pay back their old loans to
South Korea's commercial banks either." [19] Once the South Korean
currency began to depreciate, the foreign debt burdens of South Korean
banks and industrial firms became commensurately larger in local
currency terms, driving even more companies into default.
Structuralists shared many common understandings of the crisis
with left-wing neoliberals while advocating somewhat different
responses. For example, economists from both perspectives agreed that
the crisis was mainly financial, not reflecting adversely on the
fundamental strength and "soundness" of the South Korean economy. As
a result, both structuralists and left-wing neoliberals favored
strengthening financial regulations and measures to reduce short-term
capital flows. For structuralists, however, such regulation was not
only a means for keeping the banking system and business balance
sheets safe and stable, but also a necessary tool of activist
industrial policies. This explains why structuralists were much more
likely to strongly support selective credit controls and stringent
controls on short-term capital flows.
Structuralists and left-wing (and conservative) neoliberals also
agreed on the need for upgrading production and investment into higher
tech, higher value added sectors. Significantly, structuralists did
not even dissent from the neoliberal call for the gradual removal of
trade protection in pre-established industries. [20] However,
structuralists did part ways with left-wing neoliberals in their
consistent advocacy of strongly interventionist state policies,
including trade protection and export subsidies, as necessary weapons
in the industrial upgrading process. Most neoliberals, even the left-
wing ones, would have such upgrading develop "naturally" with
government support limited to the provision of "public good"
facilities (education, basic research, transport, communications) and
the establishment of the stable domestic environment required by
domestic entrepreneurs and TNCs. In this connection, structuralists
were more sensitive to the potentially adversarial relations between
host countries and TNCs then were left-wing neoliberals, endorsing a
strong government negotiating stance vis-a-vis TNCs to ensure
effective transfer and indigenization of productive capabilities.
Finally, both structuralists and left-wing neoliberals strongly
rejected IMF-type austerity policies as the proper medicine for South
Korea and the other East Asian countries in crisis, believing that
such policies would only accentuate their credit crunches and
recessions. Indeed, both groups of economists worried that imposition
of IMF-type austerity was likely to generate major political
backlashes with uncertain consequences. However, structuralists were
more willing than most left-wing neoliberals to sacrifice some
"stability" in IMF-type terms in exchange for more effective
achievement of industrial development goals. This meant among other
things a greater willingness to accept higher rates of inflation.
IV. Critique of Structural-Institutionalist Responses
For structuralists and left-wing neoliberals, development was
mainly a matter of making technological and managerial improvements in
the system of production on micro and macro levels. True, left-wing
neoliberals were more likely to limit the engineering program to state
provision of the conditions required for "market forces" to work their
developmental magic. Nonetheless, the structuralists' preference for
a more interventionist engineering of industrial competitiveness did
not reflect any fundamental dissent from the mainstream vision of
"modernization."
This technocratic bias helps explain structuralism's general
disregard of the liberalization pressures produced by state-capitalist
development itself. Especially as regards South Korea, structuralists
tended to treat such "premature" liberalization as a symptom of a lack
of strength and will among state managers. They ignored the relations
between the weakening of financial controls over the big chaebol
enterprises and the accumulation of capital in and through the chaebol
themselves. In reality, South Korean trade gains gave the chaebol
greater independence from a weakening state, allowing them to use
their profits for speculative rather than productive investments. In
addition, the success of South Korean enterprises in penetrating core-
country markets (especially the U.S.) encouraged core-country
governments to push harder to open South Korean markets -- not only in
agriculture but increasingly in industrial and financial sectors.
This in turn threatened South Korea's activist industrial policies by
eroding the fat domestic profit margins previously used to subsidize
the export and import-substitution efforts of domestic firms. As the
structuralists themselves emphasized, the forced opening of the
domestic financial system seriously muddied up the South Korean
government's financial controls over domestic business operations and
gravely disrupted its sectoral investment planning efforts.
The structuralists' technocratic focus on national industrial
policies also caused them to ignore the systemic roots of regional and
global overproduction with its disruptive effects on export-led
growth. They disregarded the connection between competitiveness in
terms of low unit labor costs on the one hand, and the limitations of
domestic wage-based demand as a share of potential output on the
other. Combined with the limits of core-country markets and growing
competition from lower wage countries (especially China), this
subordination of wage-based demand had, by 1996, produced falling
export prices and steep declines in export growth rates for South
Korea as well as the SEA-3. Finally, the growth of disruptive
liberalization pressures, and the effective reduction of statist
policy options, has arguably been worsened by the end of the Cold War.
Simply put, the U.S. no longer has an overriding interest in promoting
any new industrialization success stories (and potential competitors)
in East Asia or anywhere else. In all these ways, structuralists
evaded the most important implication of the crisis, namely, the
closing off of development possibilities.
V. Conclusion: The Need for Alternatives to Capitalism
Our survey of mainstream responses to the East Asian crisis
reveals not only their theoretical and practical bankruptcy, but also
that this bankruptcy is symptomatic of a global capitalist system
which is increasingly incapable of accommodating national development
efforts even on its own terms of competitiveness and growth. The East
Asian crisis is sweeping away contrary illusions about the
opportunities for "modernization" within the capitalist framework --
illusions whose basis had been largely provided by the special
circumstances of the Cold War and by the relatively strict
subordination of financial capital to industrial capital in the
immediate post-World War II era. With these circumstances no longer
present, "successful" capitalist growth now -- even more than before -
- hinges on individual countries' ability to keep unit labor costs
internationally competitive, i.e., to keep working-class living
conditions below international standards for labor of comparable
productivity. This systemic bias not only makes any development
"success" inherently self-limiting, but also creates a powerful
tendency toward global overproduction and further downward pressures
on worker and community conditions on a global scale.
Given the evident foreclosure of sustainable and human-
developmental paths within capitalism, now is not the time to lose
confidence in the ability of workers and communities to create a far
better economic system. Such a system will no doubt require the
construction of new representative-democratic structures of economic
governance on local, national, regional and global levels, combined
with systems of worker control within enterprises and sectors. But in
developing our socio-economic visions, we must keep in mind the
dialectic of ends and means -- above all the principle that "every
step of real movement is more important that a dozen programs." [21]
In short, we must find ways to encourage, support, and learn from the
debates and struggles currently taking place in Asia as domestic and
global capital attempt to impose the costs of the crisis on East Asian
workers and communities. NOTES
1. Edward A. Gargan, "Currency Assault Unnerves Asians," New York
Times, July 29, 1997, p.C15.
2. "Frozen Miracle: A Survey of East Asian Economies," The
Economist, March 7, 1998, p.5.
3. For useful overviews of the mainstream debate surrounding the
East Asian experience, see Robert Wade, "East Asia's Economic
Success: Conflicting Perspectives, Partial Insights, Shaky
Evidence," World Politics, Vol.44, No.2, January 1992, pp.270-
320; Alice Amsden, "Why Isn't the Whole World Experimenting with
the East Asian Model to Develop?: Review of The East Asian
Miracle," World Development, Vol.22, No.4, April 1994, pp.627-33.
4. Joseph Stiglitz, "How to Fix the Asian Economies," New York
Times, October 31, 1997, p.A19.
5. Meredith Woo-Cumings, "How Industrial Policy Caused South Korea's
Collapse," Wall Street Journal, Interactive Edition, December 8,
1997.
6. Stiglitz, "How to Fix the Asian Economies," op. cit.
7. Joseph Kahn, "IMF Concedes Its Conditions for Thailand Were Too
Austere," New York Times, February 11, 1998, p.C8.
8. Peter Passell, "South Korea Is Facing Some Difficult Economic
Choices," New York Times, December 18, 1997, p.C2.
9. Jeffrey D. Sachs, "The Wrong Medicine for Asia," New York Times,
On-Line Edition, November 3, 1997.
10. Martin Hart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development: Economic Change
and Political Struggle in South Korea (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1993); James Petras, "The Asian Crisis," Z Magazine,
Vol.11, No.1, January 1998, pp.10-1.
11. Martin Lee, "Testing Asian Values," New York Times, January 18,
1998, p.A17.
12. Hart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development, op. cit.
13. Martin Hart-Landsberg, "The Asian Crisis: Causes and
Consequences," Against the Current, 73 March/April 1998, pp.26-9;
Walden Bello, "Addicted to Capital: The Ten Year High and Present
Day Withdrawal Trauma of Southeast Asia's Economies," Focus-on-
Trade (Focus on the Global South, Bangkok, Thailand), No.20,
November 1997.
14. Woo-Cumings, "How Industrial Policy Caused South Korea's
Collapse," op. cit.
15. Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, "Contradictions of
Capitalist Industrialization in East Asia: A Critique of `Flying
Geese' Theories of Development," Economic Geography, forthcoming
1998.
16. Ibid.; see also Hart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development, op.
cit., and Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in
Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (San Francisco:
Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1990).
17. Alice H. Amsden and Yoon-Dae Euh, "Behind Korea's Plunge," New
York Times, November 27, 1997, p.A23.
18. Robert Wade and Frank Veneroso, "The Asian Crisis: The High Debt
Model vs. the Wall Street-Treasury-IMF Complex," The Russell Sage
Foundation Web site (http://epn.org/sage/imf24.html), March 2,
1998.
19. Ha-joon Chang, "Perspective on Korea: A Crisis From
Underregulation," Los Angeles Times, On-Line Edition, December
31, 1997; Amsden and Euh, "Behind Korea's Plunge," op. cit.
20. Wade and Veneroso, "The Asian Crisis," op. cit.
21. Marx to Wilhelm Bracke, May 5, 1875, in Marx and Engels, Selected
Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p.278. For
an important attempt to develop a socialist vision in this way,
see Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global
Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up (Boston:
South End Press, 1994).