by Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
   And sorry I could not travel both…
   I took the one less traveled by,
   And that has made all the difference.
   Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, Mountain Interval, 1920
   
   THE monsoon of political manifestos pours down with wish-lists. There is little on the strategic direction for recovering the economic sloth that crept up over the last two years which might be exacerbated by the global economic downturn, and for steering towards economic expansion, allowing the transition from a low-income country to a middle-income one.
   The processes and associated strategic approaches of acquiring economic expansion are governed by political settlement. The nature, process and dynamics, and linked strategic frameworks and institutional arrangements are drawn from the ideological formation of the state and the governing political regime.
   The political process in Bangladesh has feigned to attempt framing, let alone unearthing, causes, drivers, determinants and processes of the growth path for lifting the economy, and has rather succumbed to the failed strategies, which have left devastating consequences in recent months in the countries of origin of such bankrupt frameworks. While the world is engaged in searching out new paths, the manifestoes, announced to date, are hovering in the blind alleys of what is known as mainstream policy agenda.
   
   Mainstream policy agenda
   THE reliance on market is the central idea to the current model of growth. Thus, the strategic framework of the current development paradigm calls for the removal of obstacles to market. Therefore, the key mainstream policy agenda centres on ‘market enhancing reform’. The axis of the policy prescription is the creation of capabilities of market-enhancing governance of states.
   Our understanding on growth should capture the policy debate and the consequential reforms, by adequately dissecting the following two key questions:
   1. The extent to which markets can be made efficient in developing countries, and
   2. Whether maximising the efficiency of markets (and certainly maximising their efficiency to the degree that is achievable in developing countries) is sufficient to maximise the pace of development.
   The mainstream reformers consider the first condition as the necessary and sufficient for the well-being of developing countries’ people. The argument is, as market is led by the indivisible hand, it is the best mechanism to judge both to allocate production function and distribution functions based on their ability and skill. The role of the state is minimal and it will facilitate and intervene to ensure the efficient distribution. It prescribes a completely open market with all obstacles removed for the penetration of capital.
   Markets are inherently inefficient and even with the best political will to ensure justice. Structural characteristics of the economy can ensure market efficiency, but will remain low to ensuring distributive justice until a substantial degree of development is achieved.
   In case of transition, the mainstream reformers mix up ‘static allocative efficiency’ with ‘productive efficiency’. They identify these as separate functions. That is why they cannot explain why the return on inputs required in the production fails to match with the distribution on return as they identify surplus extraction as an integral process. This surplus expropriation is considered as return on capital.
   Market enhancing governance also fails to reconcile the regenerative resources in nature and undertake structural changes required to address structural nature of poverty. Market, since the beginning of the capitalism, has commodified everything, turned nature and ecology into a production function: meaning a maximisation of its utilisation can lead to higher growth. It has brought devastating result. To fuel the growth in the system, the extraction has led to, on one hand, massive destruction of nature, eviction of the marginal people from their land on the other.
   There is no denying that successful countries have been market-oriented countries. But not all market economies have been successful. If a low-income country has to catch up with advanced countries, it requires rapid and sustained productivity growth and markets by themselves do not necessarily ensure that productivity growth will be rapid. This requires institutional system that can create both the incentives and the compulsions for rapid learning to take place. That requires the state to distribute patronage and incentives to capitalists, discipline the capitalists so that there is no fungibility, and create institutions for expansion of productive capacity.
   
   Some propositions
   THE current pattern of capitalist growth has to a larger extent only benefited the rich in the northern and southern countries as a class, and the northern countries as nation states. The current strategies, frameworks, and instruments pursued to obtain growth are inequalising, with fruits distributed to a few, mainly the corporations and elites and biased against the poor and the marginalised. The adverse effects of the reforms programme on the lives and livelihoods of the poor are increasingly evident, with disproportionately high amongst historically excluded. The reforms programme, manifested through liberalisation of market, reduced spending in social sectors such as education and health, divestment of public assets, lack of support for, and corporatisation of agriculture, and forest produce collection, privatisation of power, water bodies, trawling of coastal waters, open-pit mining, and the likes, are pushing women, small and marginal farmers, ethnic minorities, fish workers, traditional artisans, persons with disability and people living with HIV and AIDS, and other excluded people into destitution and desperation.
   A transformative agenda, with people at its centre, has to run parallel to processes of growth and distribution for capability enhancement, containment of deprivation and social protection both at national and international level. Such a vision must lead to gender-aware, self-reliant, ecologically sustainable, equalizing and rights-enhancing growth.
   We need a growth that will realise the transformative agenda putting people at the centre and the expansion of their possibility as their development agenda. This growth is possible with a visionary national development strategy embedded in the roots of rights to self determination and self reliance economy. It will work towards an inclusive society as approach to ensure redistributive justice. The model will put ecological justice for the developing countries in the international order for growth. The elements of such growth processes are:
   An active and intervening state: The state would play a critical and active role, through its tax and subsidy system, to steer the expansion of employment-intensive productive capacity, to enhance capabilities by investing in public (social) services, and to contain deprivation and destitution through statutory provision of universal social security.
   Regulation of market and international trade: The market regulation will lead to maximisation of distributive justice both at the production and distributive stage. These will be achieved through measures that will ensure discipline on emerging capitalists to ensure that resources to stay in productive hands. The growth must put a cap on the means and amount of profit through just distributive tax policies. International trade will be encouraged based on the needs of nations. Trade and investment in basic extractive resources will be regulated by international bodies. Access to technologies and intellectual properties will be available for further growth.
   An employment creating growth: The employment-led growth will be carried by a massive programme of regenerative agricultural development and low-carbon-induced industrialisation. This skill-based, labour-intensive, appropriate technology-oriented growth will ensure maximum utilisation of productive labour force from youth and women. Since the centre of the growth will be the peripheries and will spread across and there will be minimum forced migration. This mode of growth will connect informal sectors strongly as this will ensure maximum return for the sector at the production stage.
   Industrialisation at both national and rural levels: Ecological justice will be at the core of its industrialisation while protection of workers rights will be integral part of industrialisation with an objective to create employment. The vexing problem of unemployment can be tackled effectively through a proper planning for basic and rural industrialisation. It will also demonstrate that the strategy works not only in resolving the problem of unemployment but also containing the urban migration. Growth will be dependent of the industries that will make the economy self-reliant and will mainly cater to the local needs of the market. A controlled collective entrepreneurship will be encouraged as means industrialisation. Collective ownership and a return on risks for entrepreneurship will be ensured. Government will ensure and facilitate basic infrastructure and service sector for industrialisation.
   Sustainable regenerative agriculture: Agriculture of the economy will be sustainable in the sense that it will retain producer’s control over the inputs and outputs to the extent that it will maximise returns. This agriculture technology and input cost will be mainly guaranteed by the government by undertaking research and development function in its hand with low cost in technology transfer and by ensuring the supply of inputs on time. The economy will make sure that the nation in general attains food sufficiency as well as there is food sufficiency at every level: from household to local market.
   Knowledge and technological catching up: The goals are to ensure the compatibility of technologies in different sectors, to ensure that critical backward and forward linkages were achieved, and to ensure that investments in high value-added products that were sensitive to complementary investments were not lost. These types of coordination can significantly enhance the incentives for investing in higher productivity sectors.
   Distribution for capability enhancement: The long term method for capability enhancement redistribution will take place by making free, quality and full education for all and free tertiary healthcare for a diversified skilled resource who will both contribute to creating growth as well as exercise the development of full potential as human. This will keep the social mobility as a dynamic function, ensure intergeneration redistribution of justice and keep the deprivation at its minimum.
   Containment of deprivation through social protection: The public welfare mechanism must be prompt, equality based and just in order to contain deprivation to its minimum level.
   Shift from fiscal conservatism: The governments need to pursue appropriate expansionary fiscal policy in view of the critical role of public investment. There needs to be more emphasis on raising public resources in ways that is anti-poverty, through effective implementation of progressive direct taxation, (flexible) trade taxes and taxes on capital movements.
   This new kind of growth is a fundamental part of a national development strategy, driven by transformational politics, aiming to distribute resources, capacity and technology to promote a new society. This is a long term agenda which is centred around distributive justice both at the production and distribution stage, while in the short run it wants actions that can help achieve that, putting poorest and resource people at the centre. This promotes a new order of international cooperation, trade and justice mechanism; and calls for ecological justice based on intergenerational needs and extraction of resources.