Sweden vs. UK: Confronting Neoliberalism (..again)

Guardian Unlimited Politics Special Reports George Monbiot: Punitive - and it works

It is always a pleasure for me to read George Monbiot's works. I have referenced his articles in my previous posts, and will try to do it regularly in the future. In this column from The Guardian of 01/11/2005 Monbiot confronts the persistent defenders of neoliberal economic policies and there assertions that the model is working by really helping the poorest countries. He disagrees with Gordon Brown's suggestion of close and irrevocable link between the richest and the poorest of this World, because as he notes "their (G8) concern for the poor ends where their concern for the rich begins." His criticism extends the widespread expectation of trickle-down effects of the neoliberal economy; point illustrated in publications of The Economist magazine.

But what the neoliberals - who promote unregulated global capitalism - tell us is that there is no conflict between the whims of the wealthy and the needs of the wretched. The Economist magazine, for example, argues that the more freedom you give the rich, the better off the poor will be. Without restraints, the rich have a more powerful incentive to generate global growth, and this growth becomes "the rising tide that lifts all boats". Countries which intervene in the market with "punitive taxes, grandiose programmes of public spending, and all the other apparatus of applied economic justice" condemn their people to remain poor. A zeal for justice does "nothing but harm".

In order to test the neoliberal's hypothesis Monbiot decides to compare UK, which calls the pioneer of neoliberalizm and Sweden - "one of the last outposts of distributionism" He suggests to use set of statistics "the Economist is unlikely to dispute: those contained within its own publication, the 2005 World in Figures". Using this and other sources like UN Human Development Report he provides comparison figures that can be summed up as follows:

2002 GDP per capita: Sweden $27,310, UK $26,240. Sweden was behind 7 times since 1960

Current Account Balance: Sweden +$10bn, UK -$26bn

Inflation rate: Sweden's Lower

Global competitiveness: Sweden's Higher

Business creativity and research: Sweden's Higher

Human development index world ranking: Sweden 3rd, UK 11th

Life expectancy world ranking: Sweden 3rd, UK 29th

Phone lines/100 people: Sweden 74, UK 59

Computers/100 people: Sweden 62, UK 41

% bellow poverty line: Sweden 6.3%, UK 15.7% ($11/day -developed countries' index)

% functionally illiterate: Sweden 7.5%, UK - 21.8%

Upward mobility: In UK 3 times more like to stay in the same econ. class one was born to.


The exact references for this statistics can be found on Monbiot's website.
In conclusion the author makes the following suggestion:

So for countries hoping to reach the promised land, there is a choice. They could seek to replicate the Swedish model of development - in which the benefits of growth are widely distributed - or the UK's, in which they are concentrated in the hands of the rich. That's the theory. In practice they have no choice. Through the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, the G8 governments force them to follow a model closer to the UK's, but even harsher and less distributive. Of the two kinds of capitalism, Blair, Brown and the other G8 leaders have chosen for developing countries the one less likely to help the poor.