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Leontief
Prize
"Ruling
Out National Development? States, Markets and Globalization"
Remarks
by Neva Goodwin
to introduce the 2002 Leontief Prize recipients
at Tufts University, on November 21, 2002
I’ll just start by saying a few words about
Wassily Leontief and the impact that he had on our
institute before I go on to introduce our speakers.
At previous ceremonies I mentioned some things about
Leontief’s own life and work. This year I have
a special reason to mention what he got our institute
into. He was a kind of Johnny Appleseed, which is
a very American image for a man who was a delightful
mixture of Russian, European and American. He dropped
seeds of ideas as he went through life, and one of
the flowers that resulted was Microeconomics in Context.
The Russian version, which was actually the second
to come out -- the Vietnamese moved faster -- is one
of the outcomes of an eight-year project that began
when Wassily urged me to think about what kind of
economics was going to be taught in Russia as it made
the transition to a market economy. Neither he nor
I, nor the economics teachers in Russia whom I met
during the 1990s, believed that it made sense to simply
translate the textbooks that were being used in the
U.S. So we started from the experience of Russian
teachers and students, and tried to explain their
economic system as it now exists, and the variety
of directions in which it might go. It was a long
project, and with the nearly simultaneous appearance
of the three different language versions of the result,
I wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge our
debt to the seeds of inspiration and ideas that Wassily
Leontief gave us.
Now
turning to the contemporary policy issues that our
speakers will address, I think we all are here today
because we’re aware that there is no economic
policy issue that elicits such fierce international
debate as globalization, including the related debates
over how to manage the trend towards greater international
economic integration. This has been a focus of GDAE’s
own work in its globalization and sustainable development
program, which is contributing to the growing recognition
that liberalization is not automatically bringing
about either development or environmental improvement.
The highly visible protests in the streets of Seattle,
Washington, Prague, Quebec, Genoa, and most recently
in Quito, Equator, have their counterparts in academia.
The Washington Consensus has become, in the words
of one of GDAE’s advisory board members Nancy
Birdsall, Washington contentious.
Today
we’re honoring two people who, through their
rigorous empirical work on development and trade liberalization,
are advancing the frontiers of economic thought. They
have scrutinized the idea and the reality of free
trade in the light of economic and social realities.
In the process, they’re helping to rescue at
least the academic discussion from a descent into
ideological advocacy by asking the question that was
at the core of Wassily Leontief’s own work;
how is economic theory playing out in practice?
Our
first speaker will be Dani Rodrik, Professor of International
Political Economy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy
School of Government. He has emerged in recent years
as one of the leading voices in the economics profession
calling for a reexamination of the rush towards liberalization
in trade and capital markets. In a recent sweeping
review of the literature on the subject, he and his
colleagues have shown that the empirical relationship
between economic integration and development is not
as tight as some suggest. He argues convincingly that
free trade proponents overemphasize economic integration
at the expense of poverty reduction and economic growth.
He also crosses the normal boundary line of disciplines,
to examine government roles and the intriguing question
of why some governments are better at making economic
policy than others. Among the many activities that
indicate the range of his interests and his influence,
Professor Rodrik is an advisor to the Central Bank
of the Republic of Turkey and was a fellow of the
World Economic Forum in Davos in 2000. To mention
only a few of his publications, recent books include
Making Openness Work: The New Global Economy and the
Developing Countries and Has Globalization Gone Too
Far?
[I
would like to invite Dani Rodrik to come to the stage
so that Bill and I can give you the two things that
an academic institution such as ours can give, which
is to say books. This is one of the sets of our Frontier
Issues, and of course the recognition of this award.]
Thank
you very much for a very provocative and interesting
talk. There’s a tremendous complimentarity between
the work of our two award recipients today, Alice
Amsden the Barton T. Weller Professor of Political
Economy at MIT, is perhaps best known for her recent
work on the role of the state in newly industrializing
countries. Her 2001 book, The Rise of “the Rest”:
Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies,
highlights the importance of an active state in promoting
industrialization; a perspective which challenges
many of the tenants of mainstream development institutions.
She has shown that the paths followed by some of the
countries that have achieved a significant level of
industrial development such as Korea and Taiwan, did
so with a strategic blend of non-market and market
approaches. But she argues, it is becoming more and
more difficult to chart such a path under the emerging
rules for the global economy as dictated by the World
Trade Organization and the international financial
institutions.
Every
year the Scientific American names fifty “visionaries
from the worlds of research, industry and politics
whose recent accomplishments point toward a brighter
technological future for everyone”. This year
Alice Amsden received a Scientific American Fifty
Award under the category manufacturing. The other
two winners in this category were developers of computer
technology. What Alice Amsden has contributed in this
area is to help manufacturers understand the world
in which they operate as a part of the light that
she had shed for all of us on the overall economic
system that includes manufacturing. We’re eager
to hear what she has to say to us this afternoon,
Alice please come up and we will make our presentations.
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