Utilising the market for the common good

There is little doubt that the market can be made to operate for the common good if an organised society ensures that even while working freely the market is geared to assist social development.
In the context of the hopes raised by the World Summit for Social Development (Copenhagen 1995) and especially the expectations of the Global South, strategies and programmes were required to be fashioned and ways and means needed to be found to use the market to achieve the three major goals of social development for the common good:
a) Alleviation and reduction of poverty
b) Expansion of productive employment and
c) Enforcement of social integration, particularly of disadvantaged and marginal groups.
This is not only the age of the market economy but also of participatory democracy. The question, therefore, is how far the democratic state should intervene "to balance the unequal forces of markets and to protect diverse individual aspirations, while ensuring continued creation of wealth and resources. Many governments adopt a degree of reduced economic efficiency or growth in order to ensure other values which they deem equally important."
BEYOND MERE ECONOMIC GROWTH AND THE MARKET: There is now increasing national and regional awareness that mere economic growth is not development for it does not, by itself, secure the common good. Thus the Regional Strategy on Environmentally Sound and Sustainable Development (ESSD) prepared for the Asia-Pacific Region by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) presented at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), 1992 called for:
". . . moving in a different direction with sustainable economic development no longer meaning to accelerating the rate of increase of GNP (gross national product)." It also said, "There is a need to develop new measures, or a set of measures, of development that inter alia reflect natural resources depletion, the environmental and health impact on population and the dissipation of human capital through poverty, ignorance and disease".
Growth-oriented economism has not helped this move in a new direction. Growth has frequently distorted social harmony and proved a block to better quality of life for the society as a whole. Nations with impressive economic growth have been confronted with titanic social and environmental problems leading to increasing political unrest.
By contrast, agrarian reform brought forth through effective legislation, helped Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China achieve excellent results, in terms of social development and also economic growth.
The Indian state of Kerala provides another "interesting but often overlooked" case of the efficacy of the reformative approach (through effective legislation successfully implemented) in ensuring substantial progress in terms of quality of life. Comprehensive land reform measures that began in 1970 gave 1.5 million tenant-labourers rights to farmland or to a house and garden.
"Despite a per capita income less than 2/3 of all-India average, Kerala's adult literacy is twice the national average, people live on average 11 years longer, the infant death rate is 2/3 lower, and inequalities between the sexes and castes are less than in any other state".
The concern of the ESCAP Regional Strategy for ESSD for developing a new measure or set of measures that, among other things, reflected "the dissipation of human capital through poverty, ignorance and disease" is realistic and timely even now. For while the primarily growth-oriented strategy has been shown to certainly lead to environmental destruction and is uncertain on achieving a better quality of life for the poor, the "trickle-up" approach leads to economic growth that is closer  to environmentally sound and sustainable development. "Human capital" yields greater "profit", if this approach is adopted, for both sound economic growth and environmentally sound and sustainable development. Economic growth apparently does not cause increase in quality of life but increase in quality of life does lead to economic growth which is more in tune with ESSD.
From this angle of vision what we have is a dim view of economic growth as emanating from the operations of a free market. This view asserts: "economic growth is not progress if what is important is environmentally sound and sustainable development, where development means equitable social development in harmony with nature and cultural conditions. Let us measure and judge according to what is considered valuable by human beings - not the impersonal and imperfect world market - and let economic growth fall where it will."
Such an approach insists that development issues are not technological and financial but matters of social equity and distribution of power.
Capital flows to expand the resource base are not the answer, new approaches to social and environmental deterioration are compulsory.
 "This means starting from a different set of premises and rediscovering fundamental values. It means trying to think of people - people not as problem but people as solution. It means letting people themselves decide and plan, succeed and fail. And people does not mean only politicians and businessmen, it means women and tribals and the poor and crippled and slum dwellers - ordinary folk. It means valuing diversity, sustainability, community, and livelihood security, whether or not these can be valued through the market place."
These thoughts are not new. Manifest in a different context in the 1990s these moved men nearly four decades ago. As a 'socialist' former prime minister of the Caribbean island, Jamaica, Michael Manley asserted in 1977:
"No country is safe in which few own all the wealth and live luxuriously and the masses own nothing and live in grinding poverty.
"In such a situation a government anchored in democracy and social justice has an inescapable obligation to do everything possible and constitutional to adjust the social imbalance".
As within nations, so also in the world at large:
". . . millions of people die of starvation . . . while the food thrown away in garbage bins could have kept them alive. . . .  The disparities and contradictions are themselves bad enough: but their impact is worsened by the fact that the communication and media systems of the world propagandise the population to accept these things in the name of peace and order, and the same time, attempts to redress wrongs are often blasted as subversive.
"…Internationally huge armies are maintained by developed nations in the name of peace while the poor starve in the name of underdevelopment. All this and more is seen and understood. Yet the world's political systems remain in the grip of a seeming paralysis, forever talking but seemingly powerless to act except preserve wrong".
WHAT IS THE WAY OUT? "In the last analysis, international economic undertaking must be brought under a system of international political management. This system of management must in its turn, be directed to the ending of injustice and inequity among all nations. Equity is achieved within nations through the deliberate political management. A parallel exercise is required internationally so that similar ends may be attained as between nations at different level of economic development."
WHAT IS NEW TO MAKE THE MARKET REACH BEYOND ITSELF? There is a great difference between the world that was even in the 1970s and mid-80s and the world that is in the second decade of the 21st century.
The questions that were posed in the 1970s remain the same. The answers have changed. The same objectives: justice, equity and harmonious and peaceful comprehensive and sustainable development remain to be achieved. They need and ought to be achieved through new strategies and programs. That is what is new.
In our times the market is an undeniable and indivisible part of the existing reality. In an imperfect world the market has emerged as the mechanism for achieving the dream of the freedom for creativity and enterprises of individual human beings in a pluralistic and democratic framework underscored by the primacy of human rights. The mechanism may have its defects. Nevertheless, it is here to stay. The experiences of the erstwhile and existent socialist systems have shown that it cannot be wished away if new and needed wealth has to be created. On the other hand many economically growing and socially vibrant Asian and Pacific societies have proved that the state aiming at the common good can use the market, without distorting it, to achieve a better quality of life for its citizens.
As has been observed, the market is not, by itself, friendly or inimical to the common good. It is neutral. For securing the common good the socio-political management (state at the national level, the nations united at the international level) should work in tandem. Market economy helps to create enormous productive resources. Efficient socio-political intervention will ensure the continuity of resource generation. Moreover, the socio-political management need to take adequate measures so that markets can be people-friendly. Stable macroeconomic environment, adequate infrastructural facilities, a comprehensive incentive system, removal of arbitrary control, liberal trade regime etc. can be such effective measures that may be adopted by governments. Adequate investment in human development prepares people for the market. A fair tax regime and an equitable distribution of assets (e.g. through land reform) help to curtail the growth of tycoons and robber barons. Underprivileged classes which are apparently excluded from the market can be brought under the social safety nets to enable them to get prepared for participation even in a market regime.
There was a time, not very long ago, when leaders of many societies thought that the market was hostile to the common good. They thoroughly subordinated the market to the dictates of extra-economic management. That did not work.
On the other hand, those who regarded the market as good by itself were also soon disillusioned. They realise now that the market is a bad master and a good servant. A new approach needs to be adopted. The market's strength requires to be fully utilised to serve the broader purposes of civilised societies. This is what the Social Development Summit in 1995 attempted to achieve. In its success lies the key to the emancipation of the entire humanity, especially that part of it which inhabit the economically disadvantaged Global South.
If the world truly succeeds in achieving the objectives of the 1995 Social Summit and the current Millennium Development Goals (MDG) it may still find the essential truth in the observation of Euripides - a path may indeed be there where no man thought. The market can ensure the common good if the global society puts the it to right use.

Dr. Mizanur Rahman Shelley, founder Chairman of Centre for Development Research, Bangladesh (CDRB) and Editor of quarterly Asian Affairs, was a former teacher of political science in Dhaka University and former member of the erstwhile Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP) and former non-partisan technocrat Cabinet Minister of Bangladesh.
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