(EU) and the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR)? - FDCL

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34 United Nations in September 2000 67 are to: 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger 2. Achieve universal primary education 3. Promote gender equality and empower women 4. Reduce child mortality 5. Improve maternal health 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases 7. Ensure environmental sustainability 8. Develop a global partnership for development All UN member states have committed themselves to reach these goals by 2015. But what are these supposed connections between FDI-Flows and these Millenium Development Goals – that are viewed as immanent by the authors of the UNCTAD-study? They associate some kind of magical relationship of foreign private investment and development, so that, e.g.: • Foreign private investment in the food industry would eradicate hunger. • Privately financed primary schools would guarantee a universal primary education for all children. • Sales-related production of goods and services would promote gender equality and the empowerment of women. • Privately financed hospitals, a competitive health sector and profit-oriented pharmaceutical research would reduce infant mortality, improve maternal health and combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. • Privately financed industry and infrastructure projects would ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership for development. 67 See, e.g., http://www.uno.de/sg/millennium/ziele/, http://www.un.org/millennium/ or also http://www.developme ntgoals.org.
The reasons for propagating this connection and what it seems to actually mean can be extracted from the foreword of the “World Investment Report 2003 - FDI Policies for Development: National and International Perspectives”: “UNCTAD seeks to further the understanding of the nature of transnational corporations and their contribution to development and to create an enabling environment for international investment and enterprise development,” 68 - it can hardly be expressed more clearly whose “environment” and “development” is meant. Behind this lies the firm belief that 1) it is the market and only the market that constitutes the universal remedy for development and the belief that 2) foreign direct investment plays a special role in this context, as if each had a direct impact on the corresponding development of the investment-importing country: Job-creation, the extension of infrastructure, technology-transfers, stabilization, the creation or stimulation of national value creation chains, the stimulation of domestic demand, in order to, in the end, foster development. 1) It is on the one hand questionable, to what extent this one-way causation determined connection between market and development should promote something like sustainable development. The Brundtland-Report (“Our Common Future”) of the Worldcommission on Environment and Development from 1987 had defined sustainable development as follows: “Sustainable development is development, which satisfies the needs of the present generation, without limiting the capability of future generations, to satisfy their own needs.” Furthermore, it can be questioned how this connecton should promote development– here in terms of the more narrow definition of mere growth – at all, even in view of the above mentioned UN Millenium Goals, since the neoliberal understanding of market and development assumes – unquestioned – that development occurs –exclusively- by means of the market. Not only market access in the area of foreign trade is demanded, but simply everything is to be left to the market: National or regional measures like programs to promote development or governmental incentives to create or implement socially or ecologically meaningful objectives are not only not regarded by the neoliberal model, but are explicitly contrary to this. If everything is subordinated to the regime of production and profit, then the governmental scope for design and action and thereby also democratic decision-making processes are severely limited. 2) It is also questionable in terms of macroeconomics, how cause and effect – with respect to the relationship between FDI and development - should work in the desired way: It is not inevitably causal, that FDI is directed towards the respective do- 68 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD): World Investment Report 2003 - FDI Policies for Development: National and International Perspectives, New York/Geneva 2003, p. ii. [Accentuation made by the author.]. 35
Page 2 and 3: Christian Russau Enforcement of int
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(EU) and the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR)? - FDCL

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