Freedom and Development

Jan 08, 2010 Editorial

As we begin this New Year, it does appear that there is a ferment brewing as to what direction exactly our country will be taking in its development trajectory. We have a LCDS that will inform the content of our economic strategy in the years ahead; but what about the political component? As a country with now three score years of mobilisation by an ideologically leftist party, we have learnt nothing if not that economics and politics can never be cast asunder.
It has now become clichéd to note that there is a strong nexus between freedom (political and otherwise) and development: one can be drawn and quartered nowadays for suggesting less.
Back in the 1990’s the UNDP carried out a survey that demonstrated a quite high correlation between human freedom and human development. Nations that scored high on the freedom index were also high flyers on the developmental rankings. The received wisdom was that increase of freedoms to which citizens were exposed actually unleashed increased levels of creative energies which then evidently pumped up income and material progress.
But it wasn’t necessarily the case everywhere. Take Russia, for instance. The USSR had fissioned after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the people of Russia and the other satellites that had all become newly independent countries certainly had many more freedoms than before. But through most of the 90’s their standards of living plummeted as their economies shrank by some 20% annually. Polls in these “transition countries” show, even now that the situation has stabilised somewhat, that substantial majorities of the populace are not comfortable with the trade-off they made between freedom and development.
China was another country that, like the USSR, had a command economy – a society that was rigidly controlled and change was being demanded. In 1989, demonstrators for “freedom and democracy” were mowed down by government troops and tanks at Tiananmen Square.
The Chinese took a different tack from the Russians and separated their political and economic development. The economy was allowed to function along free-market lines while the communist political system was retained in toto. In this way, they avoided the disruptions that had brought down the Russian economy. In fact, the Chinese economy became the most robust one globally for the next two decades and amazingly catapulted to third place (behind the USA and Japan). If they keep up their present growth rate they are expected to surpass the USA as the largest economy by 2030.
Such results question the automatic causative connection that is made between freedom and development – especially as it relates to the poorer, underdeveloped countries such as Guyana. China may sometimes be considered a special case on account of its immense size and population. However, Singapore on the other hand is a much smaller country – a city-state, for that matter – that has also given a different emphasis on the factors of the freedom and development equation.
Singapore has no poverty, even as its per capita income rivals the upper brackets of even the most developed countries. Its government not only works but delivers the expected social services such as education, pensions and health with such efficiency and honesty that it is a model for the rest of the world. China, as a matter of fact, sends hundreds of its bureaucrats there annually, to be trained.
Politically, however, there is tremendous control over aspects of personal behaviour that would raise the hackles of the proponents of greater “freedoms” in the west and places such as Guyana.
Criticism of the government is limited to that what is deemed “constructive” – and it is the government that does the deeming. Anything that might threaten social stability and public order – and the government has established some very hair-trigger rules on this score – is forbidden and subject to swift and draconian punishment.
The local media is almost totally controlled by state-owned companies and even internationally owned media is subject to strict guidelines. Even spitting or chewing gum in the wrong place could get you in trouble.
Guyanese are chomping on the bit for a change in their economic fortunes. Are they willing to make the Singapore trade-off towards that end?

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