COMMENTARY

Spring 2010

by Deisy Ventura

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Patrick Messerlin thinks that the failure of OECD countries to address pressing issues like trade, the economic crisis and the environment, will have dramatic consequences for the main emerging economies – Brazil, China, India, Korea and Mexico. He even goes so far as to argue that deficiencies among the OECD’s members threaten world peace.

These points must surely raise questions about the OECD itself. Is it really the right institutional arena for the world’s emerging economic powers? Mexico has been in the OECD since 1994 and Korea since 1995, and the future membership of Brazil, China and India has become an OECD priority, even though their accession still seems like a distant goal. Of the South American countries, small and highly-liberalised Chile was the first to join the organisation, an event that coincided with the coming to power of Chile’s first conservative government.

This raises the question; does the prospect of OECD membership exert a positive influence on the governments of would-be member countries? And do these countries really want become members? By and large, these emerging economic powers are already introducing the reforms that are needed to join the OECD because that’s how to secure their own economic future, not because of any wish to enter the so-called rich man’s club. OECD membership could even be considered a prize these countries may receive for making sensible economic adjustments.

Another question raised by Messerlin’s article is whether OECD countries can contribute to world peace and to the health of emerging economies. The economic crisis has shown the limitations of the economic models adopted by OECD members. Developing countries and emerging countries are clamouring for markets to be opened because exports to developed states are critical to their economic future. But the crisis has led once-staunch defenders of liberalism – the United States, for instance – to opt for a measure of protectionism.

Because the developed world is finding it so difficult to live up to its own principles, the future of the World Trade Organisation has been put at risk and relations between richer and emerging countries have been further complicated.

Among the emerging economic giants, Brazil has emerged the strongest from the crisis. But neither Brazil nor other developing countries have presented an alternative to OECD’s development model. All emerging countries are distinguished by deep inequalities in income distribution, which has disastrous consequences for the quality of their institutions. Human rights abuses are common, especially when it comes to economic and social rights, and environmental issues don’t receive the attention they deserve. Although projects like biofuel development in Brazil have been broadly welcomed, they are a drop in the ocean when set against the environmental devastation that takes place in these countries. The northern hemisphere’s timidity at Copenhagen has done little to settle this matter. But the greatest common weakness of both emerging and developed countries is their failure to make sustainable development a reality.