The Enron of the Developing World

By Robert Weissman, Washington Post, 25 September 2002, page A27

Wall Street gets it. So does Congress. Even President Bush gets it. But not the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The era of market fundamentalism is over. Marketization, deregulation and privatization, and the opportunities for market manipulation offered by inadequate regulation—all central elements in the rise and fall of Enron—are now discredited in the United States. And in developing countries, where their effects have been most devastating, they are the object of widespread public opprobrium.

Unfortunately, the IMF and the World Bank continue to sing from the market-fundamentalist hymnal.

• Marketization: Just as Enron created new markets in exotic commodities such as bandwidth, so the IMF and the World Bank have worked to marketize services previously in the public and noncommercial realm. Case in point: user fees for primary health care. The World Bank continues to support such charges, even after reversing its support for education fees. The effect is to deny poor people access to care. In Papua New Guinea, for instance, the introduction of user fees led to a decline of about 30 percent in the average monthly attendance at outpatient health centers.

• Deregulation: Reckless deregulation in California enabled Enron and other energy companies to gouge customers. Similarly, IMF- and World Bank-induced deregulation in developing countries has had disastrous consequences. In the Philippines and in Ghana, for example, deregulation in the mining sector has opened the country to giant multinational companies, displacing tens of thousands of residents and paving the way for environmental devastation.

• Privatization: Central to Enron's international agenda was the takeover of privatized electricity and water services in developing countries. One country where Enron sought to gain control of a privatized water system was Ghana. Concerns about corruption—including those voiced by the World Bank — led to the collapse of the deal.

  But the World Bank continues to push for water privatization in the West African nation. In preparation, water prices have doubled, and the bank anticipates prices rising for the foreseeable future, even though poor Ghanaian consumers can pay as much as 10 percent to 20 percent of their income for drinking water. In a country where one-third of urban consumers are not even connected to water pipes, the private operators would have no duty to expand service to the poor.

  In the Dominican Republic, World Bank-supported privatization let Enron swoop in, buy parts of the electric utility and jack up rates. When consumers and the government couldn’t pay the high prices, Enron turned off the power. Enron and other buyers of the privatized utility are now alleged to have paid too little, thanks to a valuation performed by an Arthur Andersen subsidiary.

• Financial market manipulation: Enron's financial fraud is now legendary. But consider the IMF's deceit in Brazil: Everyone knows the country has no prospect of paying off its foreign debt. But rather than acknowledging this and working out a discounted payment arrangement for creditors, the IMF is making new loans to pay off old ones. This has two immediate effects: It enables the private creditors, including the big U.S. banks, to be paid off, with debt obligations shifted to the IMF. And it enables the IMF to extract austerity measures from Brazil that are explicitly intended to lock in fundamentalist market policies, no matter which party Brazilians elect in coming elections.

Restraints on corporate power are even more necessary in developing countries than in the United States. But the market fundamentalists at the IMF and the World Bank continue to systematically unshackle corporate activity in the Southern Hemisphere. That's a major reason thousands will demonstrate against the IMF and the World Bank in Washington this weekend.

Action makes a difference: In 2000, after the last major U.S. demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank, Congress passed a law requiring the United States to oppose IMF or World Bank loans that include user fees for primary education or health care. Partly as a result, Tanzania lifted primary education user fees, 1.5 million additional children—mostly girls—were able to go to school.