On the road to Liberty

My article titled "Is Free Trade Fair Trade?" was published in March 2000. Free trade is fair trade, or so one thought until the recent protests in Seattle during the WTO meeting. The Seattle protesters contended that unrestricted trade harms developing countries. In contrast, India's experience provides clear evidence of the high costs of a restrictive trade policy. For almost fifty years, India, the world's largest democracy, lived under the premise that trade is a zero-sum game. Successive governments believed that free trade would only weaken the Indian economy further and open it up for even greater economic exploitation. The result of this economic experiment has been tragic but clear. In 1947, at the time of Independence from British colonial rule, India's share of global trade was estimated to be about 1.8%. Today it is less than half that. Per capita income has stagnated at less than $500, and an estimated 20-30% of the population lives in abject poverty....

My article titled "Poverty, Wealth and Waste" is Reproduced from the March 2000 issue of PERC Reports. The original pdf version of the journal is available here . PERC, a think tank based in Bozeman, Montana, USA, is dedicated to Providing Market Solutions to Environmental Problems. In 1986, a waste-to-energy plant opened in Delhi, India, financed by the Danish International Development Agency at a cost of over $10 million. The plant was expected to generate 3.8 mw of electricity from garbage, and its success was to be copied in other Indian cities. However, the plant was a failure. Two years later, the government was spending about $100,000 a year to burn garbage without producing energy. Surprisingly, the principal reason was the fact that there wasn’t enough urban waste in Delhi. It turns out that the waste—paper, rags, plastic, etc.—in Delhi produces only about half the caloric value of a Western city. This contrast tells us a lot about the treatment of waste in rich and...