Transformacoes da ordem economica mundial do seculo 19 a Segunda Guerra - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Um artigo meu promovido no Twitter da RBPI:

Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional

On-line version ISSN 1983-3121

Rev. bras. polít. int. vol.58 no.1 Brasília Jan./June 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0034-7329201500107 

ARTIGOS

Transformações da ordem econômica mundial, do final do século 19 à Segunda Guerra Mundial

Changes in the world economic order, from the end of the 19th century up to the Second World War

Paulo Roberto de Almeida ^*  

^*Ministério das Relações Exteriores, Brasília, DF, Brasil (pralmeida@me.com)

RESUMO

Ensaio de caráter histórico sobre as grandes mudanças ocorridas na economia mundial, da belle époque a Bretton Woods, enfatizando elementos de continuidade e de ruptura, tanto no plano do comércio, como no das finanças internacionais, bem como aspectos institucionais. Dentre os primeiros elementos se situam a permanência de um mesmo grupo de nações de economia avançada no pelotão das potências dominantes que formulam e determinam a agenda política internacional, bem como a importância do poderio tecnológico e industrial para apoiar a projeção estratégica e militar dessas potências; dentre as rupturas podem ser citadas a derrota dos emergentes, em especial Japão e Alemanha, que desafiaram a ordem política e econômica mundial mediante tentativas de projeção imperial que destoavam dos esforços de interdependência global que estavam sendo construídos pelas principais economias de mercado, todas de orientação política liberal democrática. A outra potência emergente no período, a União Soviética, foi relativamente marginal economicamente no período e só projetaria poder, verdadeiramente, no final da Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Palavras-Chave: comércio mundial; entre-guerras; finanças internacionais; guerras globais; mudanças estruturais; ordem econômica internacional

ABSTRACT

Historical essay dealing with the relevant changes in the world economy, from the belle époque to Bretton Woods, emphasizing elements of continuity and its ruptures and discontinuities, in trade, finance as well as in institutional aspects. Among the continuities, appears the resilience of a core group of advanced economies, which is able to draft and define the international policy agenda, and the importance of the industrial and technological capabilities to support any exercise of strategic and military projection by those big powers; among the discontinuities is the failure of some emerging powers, namely Germany and Japan, in their challenging of this world order by means of an imperial-like power projection outside of the core group of market economies aiming to create a global interdependence based on democratic and liberal principles. Another emerging power during that period, Soviet Union, was essentially economically irrelevant and was not able to project its own power before the end of the World War II.

Key words: international trade; inter-war period; world finance; global wars; structural changes; world economic order

Grandes tendências da economia mundial, de 1890 a 1944

A economia mundial, no meio século que vai do final do século 19 a meados do século 20, se apresentava como um sistema não muito bem articulado de economias nacionais e de dependências coloniais ou semicoloniais, interligadas por intercâmbios voluntários ou compulsórios de bens, serviços, capitais, mão de obra e tecnologia; elas o faziam num contexto de crescentes assimetrias estruturais entre as nações do capitalismo avançado e entre essas e seus territórios coloniais, nações semicoloniais ou países dependentes. Os elementos estruturais de divergência são provavelmente mais relevantes do que aqueles de continuidade, entre o começo e o final do período, mas, no plano geopolítico, o mundo não deve ter se alterado tão radicalmente nesse período de pouco mais de meio século.

No plano estritamente econômico, o mundo passou por fases caracteriza damente distintas ao longo do período: saltos tecnológicos, representados pelos grandes avanços da segunda revolução industrial; mudanças dramáticas nos sistemas monetários nacionais, a partir de violentas crises financeiras, de surtos violentos de inflação em diversos países, com ruptura dos regimes monetários e cambiais, a começar pelo do padrão ouro; fases de crescimento sustentado, seguidas por conjunturas de estagnação; surtos de liberalização setorial, alternando com impulsos de protecionismo comercial; incorporação de novos atores econômicos, com preservação de velhas desigualdades estruturais; fases de fechamento e de abertura aos movimentos de pessoas e aos fluxos de capitais; redistribuição dos fluxos de renda em direção de novos centros de acumulação e confirmação de antigos mecanismos de concentração e de acumulação; enfim, uma gama variada de tendências estruturais, de rupturas conjunturais e de ciclos econômicos tão diversos quanto os processos políticos que marcaram esse século ao mesmo tempo exemplarmente criador, no plano das ciências e das técnicas, mas também extremamente destruidor em termos de vidas humanas e padrões civilizatórios.

(...)

Ler a sequência neste link: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-73292015000100127&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=pt

Em pdf neste link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rbpi/v58n1/0034-7329-rbpi-58-01-00127.pdf

Deirdre McCloskey contesta solucoes de liberais para a liberalizacao economica - entrevista

 Interview  DeirdreMcCloskey

The wrong anti poverty recipes of the left according to Deirdre McCloskey

Monica Straniero

Vita International, 30 November 2016http://www.vitainternational.media/en/interview/2016/11/30/the-wrong-anti-poverty-recipes-of-the-left-according-to-deirdre-mcclos/35/

Economist Deirdre McCloskey challenges the theories of liberal pundits such as Stiglitz and Piketty and takes a swipe at foreign aid and universal basic income.

The liberal solutions to fight inequality and poverty reuduction championed by liberal economists are wrong. Deirdre McCloskey explains why to Vita International.

Joseph Stiglitz pronounced the “experiment” of the “market economy” over the past 30 years a failure. Is it true?

No, unless you think a doubling of world real incomes per head, a sharp rise in literacy and life expectancy, a dramatic improvement in access to drinking water, and on and on, all from liberal markets, is a "failure." Joe is a nice fellow, but believes that income comes from consuming more instead of producing more, and that restricting employment will raise the demand for workers, and that "struggle" is what explains rising real wages, and all manner of other fairy tales from the political left. The biggest "experiments" have been in China and India, which moved away from the policies Joe favors---slow, or fast, socialism---towards a market economy.
Even in the old countries, when the governments have not crushed market-tested betterment with regulation ("not": Ireland, Switzerland, the UK, the USA; but "crushing": Italy, France, Greece), real incomes measured to include quality improvements have risen. The longer "experiment"---Joe is a short-run sort of economist---is the new liberalism of Europe and its offshoots and then its imitators after 1800. Moving away from guilds and protectionism and mercantilist tales of aggregate demand arising from money flows raised the incomes of the poorest people in the countries that made the move by 3,000 percent. Not 300 percent, my dear students, but a factor of 30, near three thousand percent over the base in 1800. Thus Italy. Some "failure."

You say economists such as Thomas Piketty and politicians such as Bernie Sanders have been stressing the dangers of economic inequality. What do you argue?

Deirdre McCloskey vs Piketty

I argue that, for one thing, important inequality has not increased. Equality of basic goods, such as housing and food and medical care and education, is much greater in Italy, say, than it was in 1960. For another, why would one care that Liliane Bettencourt, the richest woman in the world and one of Piketty's black beasts, has an absurdly large number of chateaux and yachts? I am sure that I don't. Only a silly and sinful envy would make one care. Her riches made no one poorer. For still another, Piketty and Sanders do not include the main capital in the modern world, human capital. They imagine we still live in 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto, when indeed labor was uneducated and the bosses 

had all the land and factories. Now the significant factories are mainly inside your head and mine. We own them. For another, inheritance is a very small factor even in financial-asset inequality. For another, policies introduced to stop inequality routinely work to increase it. The Duke of Westminster just died, the richest man in England. Why so rich? Because restrictions on planning permission in London have made land rents soar---as his name implies, he owned much of the land on which London is built.

However the gap between the rich and the poor keeps widening. Over half of the top 1% of the richest people in the world are from US, UK and Japan, a quarter of the poorest 20% are in India, shows Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. How do you explain it?

No it doesn't keep widening. You need to stop believing everything you read in the newspapers! The gap even inside countries such as Italy or the USA or France was vastly larger in 1800 or 1900 or 1950 than it is now, in terms that matter for people's lives. I explain your figures by pointing out that they are financial capital (bonds and the like), not human capital, which is much more evenly spread. And income earned from physical and human capital, as against wealth, is still more equally spread. And consumption again still more. You and the poor woman down the street can put on only one dress at a time. The significant change is that she now has more than one dress, even though you, shamefully, have thirty. Worldwide even the income gap between rich and poor has radical declined. If you arrange individual incomes in a Gini-coefficient manner, in the past 30 years inequality has declined sharply. Enriching Indians and Chinese explain a good deal of it, but these days even sub-Saharan Africa is growing.

If the problem is poverty, not inequality, how to fight it?

 Yes, the great problems humanity faces are not inequality or environmental decay, despite what you read, or write, in the newspaper. The great problem is poverty. But let's stop using these leftist metaphors of "fighting," s.v.p. Running out into the street and shouting at people, much less kidnapping businessmen and murdering them (listen up, Antonio Negri.), is not how the workers get better off, economically or spiritually. They get better off by living in a better functioning economy. How to get it? As the businessmen or Paris said in 1681 when Colbert asked them what the government could do for them, "Laissez-nous faire." That was the "experiment" of the 19th century, to use Joe's term. Leave ordinary people pretty much alone, let them open shops or enter occupations, and you get gigantic betterment--electric lights, railways, radio, espresso machines, containerization, dropped ceilings, books, newspapers. Or as I put it in my books, what enriched us was the Bourgeois Deal: "Let me, une bourgeoise, start a business bettering some activity, and let me in the first act keep the profits (in the second act the irritating imitators of my success enter and spoil my profits), and in the third act I will make you [voi] better off, gigantically." And it happened, and goes on happening, if we let it.

Can foreign aid reduce poverty?

Foreign aid does not work. Read anything by William Easterly, the American economist who gave out foreign aid for decades at the World Bank. What helps is nothing "we" can do, except encourage foreign governments to stop sitting on top of their citizens and stealing from them and jailing them if they do better business. Liberalism enriches people. Most of the various governmental "programs," of which the Italian people have extensive experience with, result in autostrade to nowhere, so to speak.

Universal Basic Income, UBI, has seen a surge in popularity over the last few years. The basic idea is that people should be able to receive a certain amount of money as a guaranteed source of income. Is it a viable solution to end poverty and inequalities?

A selective, only-to-the-poor minimum income is a fine idea, if we get rid of all the other "programs." Poor people are poor because they are poor. It doesn't end the inequalities that foolishly worry Piketty, but a basic minimum income---not for every Italian, but for those who are struggling, and an minimum income "taxed" gradually as the poor get more income from wages---would eliminate the worst of poverty. I repeat: poverty is the problem, largely solved already in places like Italy and the United States. The problem is not how many Rolexes Liliane Bettencourt has.

Recently, public attention has increasingly focused on the corporate tax dodging as a strategy based on the exploitation of gaps and divergences in tax rules in order to transfer profits to low or no-tax countries. The result? Cuts for essential public programs, from education, to health care, and to clean air and drinking water…

Yes, well, if you provide everything through the government, you are going to worry if the government does not get its taxes. But if the government is "governo ladro," then one can reasonably have another attitude.
I am amazed that all thinking Italians are not members of the liberal Istituto Bruno Leoni. If Italians were Swedish, with a competent and honest state, I would not wonder. But every sentient Italian knows that it is a terrible idea to send more money and power to Rome. Most Americans, especially in a corrupt state like my own Illinois, know the comparable truth. I am in favor of tax competition among countries, because I do not want the government to provide education, health care, clean air, drinking water, roads, and so forth. All these, even clean air, can be provided, with a few moderate taxes on carbon and some exclusively governmental activities such as going after the Mafia, by private firms. Clean water is widely provided worldwide by private companies. Sweden introduced in the 1990s educational vouchers for everybody. Le Autostrade could easily be privatized, with transponders in cars to pay the peak price. And so forth. I cannot weep that Ireland's corporate tax rate is lower than yours, or that of the USA---especially as every competent economist agrees the corporate taxes are double taxation and their incidence (that is, which people actually end up paying them) is utterly unclear, after seventy years of research on the topic.

The Economist discuss the challenges to a Liberal Order

The future of liberalism

How to make sense of 2016

Liberals lost most of the arguments this year. They should not feel defeated so much as invigorated

The Economist, December 24th 2016 

FOR a certain kind of liberal, 2016 stands as a rebuke. If you believe, as The Economist does, in open economies and open societies, where the free exchange of goods, capital, people and ideas is encouraged and where universal freedoms are protected from state abuse by the rule of law, then this has been a year of setbacks. Not just over Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, but also the tragedy of Syria, abandoned to its suffering, and widespread support—in Hungary, Poland and beyond—for “illiberal democracy”. As globalisation has become a slur, nationalism, and even authoritarianism, have flourished. In Turkey relief at the failure of a coup was overtaken by savage (and popular) reprisals. In the Philippines voters chose a president who not only deployed death squads but bragged about pulling the trigger. All the while Russia, which hacked Western democracy, and China, which just last week set out to taunt America by seizing one of its maritime drones, insist liberalism is merely a cover for Western expansion. 

Faced with this litany, many liberals (of the free-market sort) have lost their nerve. Some have written epitaphs for the liberal order and issued warnings about the threat to democracy. Others argue that, with a timid tweak to immigration law or an extra tariff, life will simply return to normal. That is not good enough. The bitter harvest of 2016 has not suddenly destroyed liberalism’s claim to be the best way to confer dignity and bring about prosperity and equity. Rather than ducking the struggle of ideas, liberals should relish it.

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Mill wheels

In the past quarter-century liberalism has had it too easy. Its dominance following Soviet communism’s collapse decayed into laziness and complacency. Amid growing inequality, society’s winners told themselves that they lived in a meritocracy—and that their success was therefore deserved. The experts recruited to help run large parts of the economy marvelled at their own brilliance. But ordinary people often saw wealth as a cover for privilege and expertise as disguised self-interest.

After so long in charge, liberals, of all people, should have seen the backlash coming. As a set of beliefs that emerged at the start of the 19th century to oppose both the despotism of absolute monarchy and the terror of revolution, liberalism warns that uninterrupted power corrupts. Privilege becomes self-perpetuating. Consensus stifles creativity and initiative. In an ever-shifting world, dispute and argument are not just inevitable; they are welcome because they lead to renewal.

What is more, liberals have something to offer societies struggling with change. In the 19th century, as today, old ways were being upended by relentless technological, economic, social and political forces. People yearned for order. The illiberal solution was to install someone with sufficient power to dictate what was best—by slowing change if they were conservative, or smashing authority if they were revolutionary. You can hear echoes of that in calls to “take back control”, as well as in the mouths of autocrats who, summoning an angry nationalism, promise to hold back the cosmopolitan tide.

Liberals came up with a different answer. Rather than being concentrated, power should be dispersed, using the rule of law, political parties and competitive markets. Rather than putting citizens at the service of a mighty, protecting state, liberalism sees individuals as uniquely able to choose what is best for themselves. Rather than running the world through warfare and strife, countries should embrace trade and treaties.

Such ideas have imprinted themselves on the West—and, despite Mr Trump’s flirtation with protectionism, they will probably endure. But only if liberalism can deal with its other problem: the loss of faith in progress. Liberals believe that change is welcome because, on the whole, it is for the better. Sure enough, they can point to how global poverty, life expectancy, opportunity and peace are all improving, even allowing for strife in the Middle East. Indeed, for most people on Earth there has never been a better time to be alive.

Large parts of the West, however, do not see it that way. For them, progress happens mainly to other people. Wealth does not spread itself, new technologies destroy jobs that never come back, an underclass is beyond help or redemption, and other cultures pose a threat—sometimes a violent one.

If it is to thrive, liberalism must have an answer for the pessimists, too. Yet, during those decades in power, liberals’ solutions have been underwhelming. In the 19th century liberal reformers met change with universal education, a vast programme of public works and the first employment rights. Later, citizens got the vote, health care and a safety net. After the second world war, America built a global liberal order, using bodies such as the UN and the IMF to give form to its vision.

Nothing half so ambitious is coming from the West today. That must change. Liberals must explore the avenues that technology and social needs will open up. Power could be devolved from the state to cities, which act as laboratories for fresh policies. Politics might escape sterile partisanship using new forms of local democracy. The labyrinth of taxation and regulation could be rebuilt rationally. Society could transform education and work so that “college” is something you return to over several careers in brand new industries. The possibilities are as yet unimagined, but a liberal system, in which individual creativity, preferences and enterprise have full expression, is more likely to seize them than any other.

The dream of reason

After 2016, is that dream still possible? Some perspective is in order. This newspaper believes that Brexit and a Trump presidency are likely to prove costly and harmful. We are worried about today’s mix of nationalism, corporatism and popular discontent. However, 2016 also represented a demand for change. Never forget liberals’ capacity for reinvention. Do not underestimate the scope for people, including even a Trump administration and post-Brexit Britain, to think and innovate their way out of trouble. The task is to harness that restless urge, while defending the tolerance and open-mindedness that are the foundation stones of a decent, liberal world.