>I think Paul's gotcha.
He doesn't "have me," since (as I said) I wasn't endorsing or condemning
the Mozambican export tax on cashews (since unlike PK I didn't claim to
know the details of the case).
And I notice that you provide us with no specific information about either
Mozambique or cashews. At least I know a little about Mozambique's
political and meteorological history.
>A strong bias against relatively small-scale rural producers has been one
>of the worst things about African state-led development over the past
>generation (see Robert Bates's _Markets and States in Tropical Africa_, or
>Dumont's _False Start in Africa_). And it does look like this Mozambiquan
>export tax is a remnant of that bias.
Not being anti-farmer in any way, I also oppose the "urban bias." It's also
much more than the urban workers that PK scapegoats. Almost the entire
urban intelligentsia endorsed the urban bias, along with such Nobel-prize
winning economists as W. Arthur Lewis (who asserted that the marginal
product of rural labor was zero, so we could increase urban production by
moving people to the city without hurting agriculture). I have a World Bank
book of "Guidelines for Project Evaluations" which equates the maximization
of profits (which accrue to residents of either domestic or foreign cities)
with development. Of course, many of the most active perpetrators of urban
bias had some sort of conversion experience and are now pushing the market
bias of neo-Liberalism, which favors the already-powerful in a process of
winner-take-all markets, encouraging increasing inequalities. They know
that they can gain from marketization by capitalizing their gains from
their powerful positions.
>After all, successful episodes of state-led development involve export
>promotions much more than export taxes...
I'm no fan of state-led development processes (not being a statist). Just
like market-led processes, most state-led policies are not held responsible
to the people in a democratic way.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
