April 13, 2006
Big Business Remittances
Henry and I are working toward producing a show from Watson on May 12. We're hoping to get Chris and the gang in for that Friday to tape a show to be aired sometime this summer.
At this point, we'd like the show to be about the economic possibilities and problems with global remittances.
Possible guests/contacts:
Uche Nworah, an expert on remittances and the Nigerian migrant worker dispora
Dilip Ratha, senior economist at the World Bank and author of Understanding the Importance of Remittances
Joy Zarembka, at the Campaign for Migrant Domestic Worker's Rights
bloggers, bloggers, bloggers
Watson folks and adjuncts.
At this stage in the research, I'm not really seeing what the arc of the show is. Defining the issue, weighing the benefits of localized remittances vs. FDI (Foreign Direct Investment), citing the major pitfalls of national reliance on remittances, then the solutions that some countries are trying to answer those problems? Sounds pretty dry-- As Mary would say, there's not much there that's keeping me from switching the dial to the ballgame.
Here are the major issues as I see them:
Scale: the amount of money remitted anually to Africa ($17 billion) rivals the amount of FDI there ($15 billion), and comes close to aid/grants figures. The impact is huge, and not studied much.
Impact: In a survey of the Nigerian diaspora, Uche Nworah found that 96% of respondents said that they contribute to nation building, especially by sending money home. But since only 6% of remittances to Africa are invested, that money might boost disposable incomes and increase educational access by paying tuition bills, but it won't account for large scale change. Also, it won't have an appreciable effect on those families which are so poor that they can't afford to send workers abroad, which might only increase the inequality. Blogger Nebuer attributed inflation to remittances in his native Kerala.
It'll be important to tie into the imigration rights protests, but since our airdate won't be set until mid summer, we won't be able to depend upon the news peg to keep people listening.
More in a bit...
Posted by Greta Pemberton at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 14, 2006
Economists for Sweatshops
Henry and I are reading Jeff Sachs’ The End of Poverty this week. The gist of his argument is that it’s unjustifiable to have a sixth of the global population in such desperate poverty that they must struggle for day to day survival; that the key is for well off countries to lower “the ladder of development” into these countries to allow them to climb up on their own. “The ladder of development” means aid, it means debt cancellation, it means international pressure for responsible governing.
In his introduction, Sachs lays out some examples of countries as reference points along the ladder’s development continuum. Malawi doesn’t have a ladder, he says. The picture Sachs paints is a country of small farmers, a country ravaged by malaria and AIDS, a country without the funds to afford preventative medicines and without the infrastructure to deliver them. No ladder.
One rung above Malawi is Bangladesh, with a thriving economy of “apparel firms” (read: sweatshops). Raised as I was to be label-conscious of the manufacturer’s labor practices, it turns my stomach a bit to think that sweatshops can be one rung above anything. But I suppose that’s a function of my swanky American passport, too.
I lived with a group of Bushmen just outside Tsumkwe, Namibia for a little while a few years ago. Bigwig anthropologist John Marshall was staying in the same place, and after a few drinks we would get into some lively debates. It’s near impossible to legislate fair land use policies to help maintain “the hunter gatherer lifestyle.” Most of the Bushmen themselves would rather herd cattle and dig boreholes (wells) and go to school than to try to survive within the traditional means, especially when land has been roped and barbed-wired off so that they’re expected to live on a tiny fraction of the land they once traveled across. The lifestyle is unsustainable. Still, our romantic notions of The Gods Must Be Crazy’s “simpler way of life are hard to rid ourselves of.
The same could be said of Malawi and Bangladesh—it seems antithetical to my every hippie romantic notion that sweatshop work could be preferable to subsistence farming. My friends at Students against Sweatshops would loathe to hear him say it, but it’s hard to argue with Jeff Sachs when he says that to demand these “apparel firms” raise wages would be “a ticket back to rural misery.”
He also brings up remittances as an important step on the way to economic self sufficiency. Henry and I are thinking of putting a show together on this topic.
Counterpoint: This American Life did a piece a while back about the Cambodian government trying to institute their own fair labor practices in the garment industry as a country: search the TAL archives for “David and Goliath” and take a listen.
Posted by Greta Pemberton at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack