Is the World Bank Group responsible for starvation deaths in Africa?

Are the WTO, World Bank, and IMF to blame for huge amounts of the world's misery? Is transnational capital flow or multinational corporations an inherently bad idea?

Read the following article !
What Is The Right Way To Complain About Globalization?

http://equivocality.net/what-is-the-right-way-to-complain-about-globalization/

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By far the greatest influence of the external environment on the development of the East African countries derives from their participation in the world economy. And the overall effect of this influence is negative. It arises from the tendency within the global economy towards the globalization of capital and its sources of profits, the transnationalization of the capitalist productive forces and production ethos, and the compradorization of ruling circles. This tendency has led to the obliteration of national economic boundaries by the activities of the multinational corporations, the globalization of production and consumption habits, the subjection of national economic politics to the dictates of foreign firms and such international capitalist institutions as the world bank and the IMF.
This passage is from a paper entitled “The External Environment of Development in East Africa”, from the book The Crisis of Development Strategies in East Africa. It reads like a totally modern critique of global capitalism and its effects on the developing world. You might hear something very like this at a WTO protest anywhere in the world. However, it was written in 1986.
The rest of the article is pretty representative of standard Marxist ideology. It uses phrase like “bourgeoisie”, “social liberation struggles”, and “crisis of the capitalist system.” I find all of this rather silly — not because capitalism does not deserve to be criticized, but because standard Marxist communist thought is economically naive, overly ideological, and, let’s face it, somewhat rabid.
This suggests to me that the standard modern sound-bite critique of globalization, which came to public visibility during the late 1990s in such large-scale movements as the Seattle protest during the WTO summit of 1999, actually originated much earlier, at least a decade, in communist ideology and protest culture.
Interesting.
Why am I bringing this up?
Clearly, something is wrong with the world economic system. Too many people are very poor, even in rich countries. The world produces enough food for all, but Sub-Saharan Africa is still starving. Americans are wearing $150 pairs of Nikes which Filipino children are manufacturing twelve hours per day for slave wages. It is easy, and important, to get angry.
But what to yell?
The protest slogans have to come from somewhere. The intellectual framework for the criticism has to come from somewhere. Most importantly, the world-view has to come from somewhere because all those students, in poor and rich countries alike, cannot actually afford to visit the sweatshops personally. Most of them also don’t care to study standard economics, because a) it’s difficult and technical and b) it’s the subject of the enemy, the barbarous tools of the capitalist pigs. I’ve actually had the director of a community currency system tell me to my face that he didn’t want to study any economics because “it’s just the old ways of thought, the system that’s keeping people down.”
What seems to have happened is the tireless first-world communist minority — who have been printing leaflets for God knows how many decades in the face of crushing indifference — found themselves in the early 1990s in possession of the only ready-made, cogent critique of globalization around. The over-branded population of the rich-countries started to wake up around that time, started to take offense at the growing invasion of corporate power into cognitive and moral spaces, but in the absence of a bigger picture all that they could muster was unease. It took a simple, quotable ideology to turn discontent into protest
Now, this is not a critique of Marxist ideology. Frankly, I think it pretty much critiques itself these days, and I encourage anyone who’s interested to read The Communist Manifesto. Marx was certainly on to something when he noted that unequal distribution of wealth was a problem, as it still is. He simply didn’t solve the problem in any meaningful sense. Instead, we got an ideology; we got the attractive, seductive, and awkward model of dialectical materialism and class war. To top it all off, his work was all grounded in very naive economics, because he wrote 150 years ago, before the development of the foundations of what is now elementary micro-economics. As a result he makes some ridiculous predictions, such as the “crisis of capitalism” due to excess surplus, which has never come to pass.
So I’m not at all bothered with communism or communists or Marxists per se, and in most cases I applaud their goals. However, I can’t stand ideology, because it gets in the way of learning. And, unfortunately, ideology seems to be mostly what those critiquing globalization at the street level mostly have to offer at the moment.
This is very, very sad, because the problems of globalization are very real, and deserve an intelligent critique.
For the record, I believe that the basic theory of comparative advantage in standard economics is correct: everyone is better off when each country produces what it can produce most cheaply. I think that the insane increases in first-world material standard of living in the last 200 years (consider, for example, how many hours you have to work to obtain a blanket now at Walmart versus 100 years ago when you had to raise the sheep first) are due mostly to specialization and technological advances, rather than the ever-more efficient exploitation of the world’s poor. In other words, I think free trade is, in principle, a good thing. Yet I am deeply uneasy about branding, and the commodification of the commons, such as the replacement of public spaces with malls. I think it is obvious that certain Powerful Interests are ignoring the trade externalities that are destroying our environment. And, as my friend Leslie Lausch asks, “why is it illegal to to violate human rights during the manufacture of a shoe in the United States, but legal to buy that same shoe if these rights are violated in another country?”
Is capitalism inherently flawed, violent and unfair? Are the WTO, World Bank, and IMF to blame for huge amounts of the world’s misery? Is transnational capital flow or multinational corporations an inherently bad idea? I don’t know. Read that again. I don’t know. This is what I am saying that the author of the above quoted paragraph is not. The world is big and very, very complex. I’m seeing as much as I can personally; for the rest I must rely on second-hand accounts. Here are some books on the subject which I have read or am meaning to read, in an effort to understand these complexities
Have read:
Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay, 2004. The best one-volume introduction to both the theory and practice of global economics that I have ever found, by a former head of the Bank of England.
First year textbook on economics. I read Lipsey, but I imagine just about anything will do. If you have first-year calculus, you can and should understand this material, because this is the best of human knowledge on how resources can/should be/are distributed in human societies; analogy is no substitute for the real deal, in the end.
No Logo by Naomi Klein, 1996. The classic, popular critique of branding and, indirectly, globalization. She makes some technical mistakes as she is not an economist (such as comparing GDP, which is essentialy the “profit” of a country, to the gross income of a corporation when looking at the relative sizes of each) so you need to be suspicious of her statistics, but she really nails down all the important but “soft” reasons why globalization is worrysome.
Open World: The Truth about Globalization, by Philippe Legrain, 2004. A slightly hysterical response to No Logo etc. by a mainstream economist, however his extensive factual knowledge is very valuable, and in the end his argument is that we can design globalization to serve whatever ends we wish.
Alternatives To Economic Globalization by John Cavanagh, Jerry Mander, Sarah Anderson, and Debi Barker, 2002. A collection of essays on the title topic. Quality varies; to me there were obvious problems with many of the schemes proposed.
The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, William Easterly, 2002. Basically, one chapter on each major economic development strategy that has been tried over the past 50 years (loans, grants, debt relief, population control, education, infrastructure building, etc.) None of them has really worked, and this book attempts to discern why. Valuable.
Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle Agaist World Poverty, by Muhammad Yunus, 2002. This is the man who won the Nobel prize for his work in micro-credit. It’s certainly a worldview — he feels that micro-credit might be able to solve pretty much everything — but the work is very solid, he’s actually helped real poor people in large numbers, and his ideas deserve serious attention.
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown by Paul Thoreaux, 2004. I don’t need to write a book about my African experience because Thoreaux has done it better than I ever could. We in west speak of “Africa” like we know what we’re saying, but we don’t. If you can’t actually visit, then you need to read this before you start talking about how to help the poor starving Africans. Hint: Africa’s problems are not entirely the West’s fault.
Want to read:
Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph Stiglitz, 2003. The classic critique by the Nobel-prize winner and former head of the World Bank.
Making Globalization Work, also by Stiglitz, 2007. Interesting title, isn’t it?
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffery Sachs, 2006. Ambitious as hell, but the man has been doing development economics for long time, plus he actually travels to meet the people he’s allegedly trying to help, so I have to take him seriously.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, 2005. A former insider for the IMF talks about all the horrible things he’s done. Radicals and conspiracy theorists alike spoke of these sorts of economic evil deeds for decades. At last, we can confirm or deny the rumors.