FIRST GLOBAL FORUM ON HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
29-31 July 1999 . United Nations Headquarters . New York
SOCIAL POLICIES IN GLOBALIZATION
H.E. Mrs. Mervat Tallawy
Minister of Insurance and Social Affairs, Egypt
I wish to thank the organizers for arranging this forum and would like to start by paying a personal tribute to a great man of all times, Mr. Mahbub ul Haq, God bless his soul. His vision and noble mission in life has inspired and will continue to inspire all those who wish to contribute to the welfare of people everywhere.
There is also no better words to describe what Nobel Laureate, Mr. Amartya Sen, has been achieving as "(he) has helped give voice to the world’s poor". This sentence – with all its simplicity – embodies the dedication, conviction, knowledge and relentless efforts that have proved to be essential ammunition to go against the tide of our material world.
Mr. Kofi Annan: underlying all his works, we are grateful to see a "human Face" to the man who – as UN Secretary General – has given a life of its own to issues that could have stopped at the intellectual and conceptual stages, had he not encouraged and spearheaded global movements to help turn them into practice.
I take this opportunity to welcome Mr. Mark Malloch Brown at the head of UNDP. This Organization has proved to have the versatility to bring to the fore, issues of most concern to the developing nations in the most dynamic ways. Its country-oriented focus does indeed play a most vital role in drawing global attention to the different sets of problems requiring international support while actively participating in experience sharing and problem solving. We have high expectations as to what Mr. Malloch Brown’s leadership will bring the organization so that it may manage its increasingly challenging mandate.
Finally, Mr. Richard Jolly, I am one of those who will continue to remember that you coined the words "Growth with a human face" back in the time when you were "giving a voice" to the children of this world. You must be proud to see that your efforts have succeeded in placing children high on the global agenda.
We hope that today, and in the days to come, we shall contribute with you all in making of this global event a milestone in development thinking. It would have, however, been appreciated if, the works of this forum would be translated into Arabic to benefit our large Arabic speaking community. I especially hope that the forum will be able to distill, from the myriad of issues that can fill a social agenda, those most promising in being the catalysts of change and to put those issues high on the policy agenda.
UNDP Human Development Report has indeed paved the way in this direction. From its inception in 1990, the Report has continued to be an extremely useful tool especially for national decision makers who care for human advance with equity. It has challenged – with evidences – that past development paradigms have not fulfilled their promise to give people the quality of life, dignity, wellbeing and security that they were to lead to. This year, as in the past years, the Report continues to offer new angles of a people-centered vision of development and proposes a number of new avenues to follow in pursuit of human advance with equity. It will be useful to remember, at this junction, that the report will need to continue to keep the trust and the confidence it has gained over the years.
The 1999 Report's emphasis on globalization addresses, in the first instance – the global community. While, we, representatives of the developing countries, are also here as members of the global community, much of the recommendations given in the report cannot be achieved without the commitment of special members of the global community such as the advanced countries who hold much of what UNDP has crafted as "Global Public goods", such as knowledge; multinational corporations; and international financial institutions. These are the major global actors and key agents of change whose influence and power has multiplied over time. Even the United Nations, which is bringing us today to face globalization, is in essence, an embodiment of such globalization.
Without strategic alliances for human development among such members of the global community, "social policies in globalization" will continue to be at the mercy of profit and special interest, with no public accountability. Our role in this matter, as developing countries, will continue to be important as long as we – either as members of the Government, or as representatives of Civil Society Organizations - are able to voice the interests and concern of the people belonging to different parts of the world. We especially need to make – or strengthen - strategic alliances for human development among ourselves - in the developing world - at the sub-regional, at the regional and at the inter-regional levels giving a new impetus to the Group of 77 mandate.
I wish to stress that the strategic alliances for human development between each of these groups need to network for synergy and not to stand in opposing camps. The human face advocated by the Human Development Report is not possible without the good will of the few institutions or few nations- in whose hands lie the decisions affecting the lives of the many nations. Conversely, these many nations need not remain passive just waiting for the good will of the few in power. For all groups I suggest to stop nurturing conspiracy theories since we are all, at the end, sharing life on this planet, for better or for worse. The United Nations System may see its role strengthened to this end.
Having heard Dr. Richard Jolly's impressive presentation, the challenge, I believe it is for us to see how we can take it from there. Let me, in this context, share Egypt’s own experience in putting social policies high on our national agenda taking into consideration the globalization element with its positive and negative implications. All official declarations are pointing to political commitments at highest levels to the social dimension of development. In fact, the Government has raised the level of its social spending to 39% of its total public spending. Spending on health and education was increased manifold in the current planning cycle.
To this effect, I wish to state that we owe a lot to the international conferences of the 1990s. They helped us realize how complex and intricate social policies are which accounts – to a large extent – for the fact that they were not clearly understood in most if not all developing countries that had adopted mixed-economies and welfare approaches. They were not also grasped by liberal views that saw the market as the balancing factor which would trigger social development as an automatic outcome of economic development. We are therefore studying new thinking in order not to come up – with false promises to the people before taking binding decisions on policies of change. We are for this matter alert to the need to ensure that issues such as "Governance" and "Public Accountability" - through monitoring, scientific and independent evaluation and impact assessment - are inherent in our directions for change.
In our definition of social policies, we have realized their intricate linkages with economic policies, and vice-versa. We have identified the need, therefore, to form strategic alliances between those in charge of the development of the economic sector – including natural resources which are now classified under the chapeau of the environment - with those in charge of the development of what constitute the social sector, such as health, population, education, science and technology, etc. We will note, however, that these form the basis on which human capital accumulates, a major factor of production, taken from the economic perspective. It is only recently that economists and financial institutions such as the World Bank have been seriously considering human capital formation, as worthy of investment. However, such investment is – as yet - far from meeting the sector’s demand either in relative or in absolute terms. Their inclusion of social development goals in structural adjustment programmes, as recommended in previous international meetings, remains far from being adequate.
Conflicting interests for development purposes put a heavy toll on very scarce resources. Prioritization as to where such resources would need to go is an area which is not getting the attention it deserves. Prioritization and allocation of resources among conflicting demands is not only between building a bridge (basically falling in the economic sector) or building a school (which is basically in the social sector), but also within the social sector. This raises a serious problem at both the international and national scales. We would also wish to draw attention to the fact that applying universal concepts, such as certain aspects of human rights, and which are often imposed by the global community as conditionality for cooperation, need to be understood in the context and in the environment in which they are to prevail.
In Egypt, we are looking at globalization as a source of opportunities and new challenges at a scale and tempo never experienced before. We are seeking aggressive approaches to turn our country’s interface with globalization into a virtuous circle, and not to stop at mitigating negative effects. We are concerned about many issues and which are all having social implications such as access to markets; restriction on the movement of labour migration; the use of technology; cultural threats; tariff barriers; pricing primary commodities; the global financial crisis; the terms of capital flow; intellectual property rights; the increase of cost of transfer of technology; and, a declining ODA.
I am glad that, as a member of the Egyptian Cabinet with a focal role in the preparation of our first National Conference for Social Development I have come, with concerned members of my office, to benefit and learn from this distinguished experts’ group. Our Conference is intended for national consensus building on a social sector reform in the country, and to agree on all what it takes to carry it out in terms of goals and sub-goals, targets, activities and inputs, as well as to establish the necessary system for checks and balances for monitoring and accountability purposes. We are also planning on building strategic alliances among the various ministries and with our other partners in development including the non-governmental organizations, the business community, and, interested members of the Development Assistance Group upon re-examining our respective roles.
We may all agree that this is a mammoth exercise, which will require efforts much greater than those displayed in the course of our economic reform and structural adjustment programme underway in the country since 1991. One major reason is that, while the International Financial Institutions offered the technical know-how for effecting the process, there is no blueprint for comprehensive social strategies as these need to be people-sensitive, and grow from there. Furthermore, when we look at experiences elsewhere in the advanced countries we find that they are currently changing much of their social policies and social security schemes which were prevailing for years as these could not be sustained in the light of demographic changes. This is to say that we do not even have a model to follow with confidence, so we have to develop our own strategy after taking stock of lessons of successes and failures. To this effect, our national document Vision 2017 gives us overriding goals aiming the welfare of the Egyptian people in the long term.
So far, we have been lucky in our economic reform programme as well as in integrating the concepts of sustainable human development in our development thinking. Our experience with the economic reform was applauded by the Bretton Woods Institutions, while our country strategy for integrating sustainable human development concepts into national planning was presented by UNDP as a best country practice to the World Social Summit in Copenhagen. We are proud to have been pioneers in issuing quality National Human Development Reports on an annual basis since 1994. The last report addresses social spending. The report is scheduled for presentation by its principal author in tomorrow’s programme. We have, therefore, reasons to be confident in our ability to develop and carry out a comprehensive social sector reform and will be happy to share this experience in due course.
Excellencies,
Distinguished Participants
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Globalization, is placing new responsibility on the global community. The role of the United Nations needs to be enhanced so that it could play an active role in mitigating its current and eventual negative effects on vulnerable countries, and vulnerable people, before these negative effects become unmanageable.
Let me, before concluding my statement, leave you with a message which I wish to see really advance on the global agenda. I wish to carry to you the voice of the dropouts of the society. They are also called the marginalized, or the socially excluded. But, through my functions as Minister of Social Affairs, I have realized that they may as well be defined as the dropouts of the formal sector. The World social Summit in Copenhagen has certainly called global attention to the need for social inclusion of such group. But they are not a homogeneous one and need to be addressed through different sets of social policies and programmes. Let me mention some of these fallouts: These are orphans, or street children, or frail elderly, or disabled or handicapped. These are also ex-convicts, or family of criminals held in prisons, or beggars, or drug addicts. These count the homeless, the victims of wars or civil strives. The nucleus family, which is gradually substituting for the expanded family, is no longer there to take care of them, nor are women who are increasingly joining the labour force. They have no viability from the point of view of economists to invest in them, but they exist in every society, and in numbers. The global community in general and the UN system in particular could be of great help by proposing and supporting programmes to address their problems in developmental rather than in welfare approaches.
This presentation may be viewed as opening a Pandora's box with regards to what needs to be taken into consideration when addressing social issues, but these are the facts of life. In conclusion, there is a need to identify – those issues more worthy of action at this time and which deserve a global movement to make the change possible and less costly through collective action. This has happened under the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) which concentrated only on four of the many problems of the environment on the basis of their global effect, and we had the global community provide the financial and structural means to go about solving them. I wish to see the same happening for the social sector.
Thank you for your attention.