Cultural Raid by McWorld

Today’s global economy has a tendency to insulate consumers from the various negative impacts of their purchases by stretching the distance between different phases of a product’s lifecycle—from raw material extraction to processing, use, and disposal. Yet at the same time, social challenges accompanying economic globalization call for innovative forms of political mobilization across international borders. Shifting to more sustainable patterns of consumption and production worldwide will require pursuing new ground rules in order to forge a global economy based on protecting cultural values.

What we see is the onrush of the economic, technological, and ecological forces mesmerizing peoples everywhere with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment, commerce and especially the culture.

Today, the global spread of McWorld is rapidly bringing the consumer society of USA to the rest of the planet. The globalization of the consumer economy is closely linked with the general economic boom and growth in the movement of goods, services, and money across international borders, which accelerated during the 1990s.

McDonald’s operates 30,000 restaurants in 119 countries and serves 46 million customers each day. Its total revenue was $15.4 billion in 2002. On opening day in Kuwait City, the line for the McDonald’s drive-through was over 10 kilometers long. McDonald's has also spread expeditiously across Pakistan in major cities. Strangely, there is no McDonald’s outlet in Peshawar and Quetta. McDonald’s costs the same in Pakistan as in the US, and given the per capita GDP disparity between the two countries, it is the cheapest food in one country, while being one of the most expensive in the other.

Pizza Hut also operates a chain of outlets in Pakistan and planning further to invest approximately 1 billion rupees in expansion. The money is being used to open 20 new outlets.

Coca-Cola sells more than 300 drink brands in over 200 countries. More than 70 percent of the corporation’s income originates outside of the United States, and its net revenues reached $19.6 billion in 2002.

Meanwhile, corporate strategies focused on boosting consumer demand in Pakistan have lead to increases in purchases of all manner of goods, from cars and televisions to paper and fast food. While it is ethically problematic to suggest that developing countries are not entitled to have the same options for material consumption that have long been taken for granted by western consumers, the global adoption of industrial country–style consumption patterns would place unbearable strains on local cultures.

The 1990s saw the emergence of many important international agreements and commitments embracing the need to transform unsustainable patterns of consumption and production. Agenda 21, the action plan that emerged from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, called on international institutions and national governments to promote greater energy and resource efficiency, minimize waste generation, encourage environmentally sound purchasing, and shift toward pricing systems that incorporate hidden environmental costs.

The UN Commission on Sustainable Development has provided a useful annual venue for governments and others to discuss consumption and production issues. The deliberations have produced little concrete action though. There is no voice raised for conservation of social values.

At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, governments agreed to develop a 10-year framework of programs to accelerate the shift toward sustainable consumption and production. These include offering a better range of products and services to consumers, providing more information about the health and safety of various products, and establishing programs of capacity building and technology transfer to help share these gains with developing countries. The World Summit also generated more than 230 partnership agreements among diverse stakeholders.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has sponsored a series of meetings and papers aimed at encouraging governments to implement innovative sustainable consumption and production policies.

In all these forums, apart from consumption and production, no emphasis is laid on the issue of social influence. Unfortunately, the limited gains made since 1992 in shifting toward more-sustainable patterns of consumption and production have been largely overwhelmed by the continued global growth of the consumer society. The controversial lifestyle issues continue to haunt.

The breakdown of WTO negotiations in Cancún in September 2003 provided reform-minded governments and activists with an opportunity to push for bringing future trade negotiations into better balance with sustainable development concerns. The way forward, nevertheless, is not yet clear.

Several new initiatives have emerged in the corporate and financial sectors, including the United Nations’ Global Compact, which calls on participating companies to integrate nine core values related to human rights, labor standards, and environmental protection into their operations, and the Equator Principles, which call on leading banks to manage environmental and social risks in their lending operations.

The international trade negotiations can provide opportunities to push for policy reforms needed to promote more-sustainable consumption and production. All the same, WTO rules and negotiations can also be used to protect cultures and social taboos of the host countries of MNCs.

Brands like McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are not just cultural aggression but also an expression of power; once America lost its power these will go. It is nonetheless impossible to filter culture. In the past we hated the British raj but gradually adopted its symbols. Today we hate America and don’t want to adopt what we think is its culture. Pakistan must save its own culture to counter the onslaught. There is a need for reform in our culture, but this should not be obfuscated through this hatred or that. The only answer to the American cultural onslaught is the protection of Pakistan’s own culture. (www.asifjmir.com)

Cutting out a Pro-Poor Budget

Each budget that the Finance Minister presented each year never touched the lives of the poor but the dignified few. Each time the budget has come to mean the elimination of benefits for the poor and elevated benefits for the rich. The hopes for making Pakistan one of the most vibrant economies of Asia is laudable but the development policies have no relevance to the man in street.

The majority of Pakistan yearns for a pro-poor budget. Promoting pro-poor growth requires a strategy that is deliberately biased in favor of the poor so that the poor benefit proportionally more than the rich.

In general a pro-poor budget is one that takes into account the needs of the poor. It is one that seeks to make a difference in the lives of the poor. It is one that would impact positively on the poor so as to enable them to actively participate in and benefit from the process of development. A pro-poor budget would enable the poor to have increased opportunities In order to be healthy, educated, productive and responsible people. Such a budget would have to have a deliberate bias so that the poor would benefit proportionately more from government expenditure than the rich.

The first step in achieving a pro-poor budget is the identification of who the poor are. The understanding and measurement of poverty has evolved over time. Today it is generally accepted that poverty is not only a money related deprivation, but a combination of several deprivations that result in lack of well being. Consequently budget provisions must respond, to this complex situation of poverty. This is no easy task. In formulating a pro-poor budget there is need to have up to date information of the levels, intensity and types of deprivations that make up poverty.

There are many reasons, both practical and strategic, to establish a conceptual linkage between gender and poverty for promoting gender-sensitive budgets. It would be a mistake to simply equate the two categories. Gender imbalances and inequalities should run across every social, economic and political classification. The exclusion and deprivation experienced by the poor is not the same, and tends to be even more acute for women than for men. Gender allows us to stop envisioning the poor as a homogeneous category of people, whose needs can be addressed in a uniform way.

Pro-poor growth should direct resources disproportionately to the sectors in which the poor work (e.g. agriculture), areas in which they live (underdeveloped regions), factors of production which they posses (such as unskilled labor), outputs, which they consume (such as food), translated into strategy of pro-poor growth - employment generation combined with price stability of goods and services which are essential items. Policies need to be designed to reflect concerns of poverty.

In order to address poverty effectively the budget will need to have more direct rather than indirect means of taxation. This would help reduce prevailing high-income inequalities and help spread the benefits of economic growth.

Pro-poor growth means that the poor benefit disproportionately from economic growth. This is to say the proportional income growth (i.e. their income growth rate) of the poor must exceed the average income growth rate. The per-capita income growth rate of the poor must exceed growth rate.

Three obvious policy messages emerge. First, policies to promote growth should help the poor although they could do so more if they made growth pro-poor rather than neutral as it currently is. Second, reducing initial inequality, particularly asset inequality, should receive highest priority, due to its triple effect on poverty. Third, reducing gender inequality should equally be of highest concern to policy makers that want to achieve pro-poor growth.

It is clear that pro-poor growth that directly reduces poverty must be in sectors where the poor are and use the factors of production they possess. The vast majority of the poor is in rural areas, a majority depends directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihood, and the factor of production the poor possess and use most is labor, sometimes land, and even more rarely human capital. Thus pro-poor growth must be focused on rural areas, improve incomes and productivity in agriculture, and must make intensive use of labor. These things are nearly tautological, but often forgotten and are clearly not reflected in public policies or in the allocation of public funds by national governments or donors.

Heavy investment in the human capital of the poor will yield two benefits on poverty reduction. It will increase economic growth and it will make growth more pro-poor. The record of East Asia is a good illustration where high human capital accumulation promoted growth and poverty reduction.

Beyond a concern for increasing average incomes and reducing poverty, there is a greater appreciation for a need to enhance the security for the population if one is to ensure sustainable pro-poor growth. The security of the poor is threatened by physical threats. Thus, the poor are forced to avoid risks that may carry high rewards, can get trapped in cycles of poverty and insecurity, and are regularly pummeled by shocks that militate against sustainable reductions in poverty.

Our budget-makers need to remember that real enemy is poverty and deprivation, that their key weapon is their skill and professionalism and that their modus operandi is their humility. They are the custodians of a value system that defines our objective as demonstrating every single day that we are a caring democracy.

Attaining a pro-poor budget is a big challenge. It requires a bottom-up approach; that ensures that poverty eradication is a central issue and not a donor driven requirement. The principles of equity and accountability with particular attention to efficiency and effectiveness have to be continually respected at each stage of the budget process. (www.asifjmir.com)

Little Angels and the Child Labor

We often hear about goals of education relate to ‘meeting our children’s needs,’ ‘responsible citizenship’ and ‘equipping students for the future.’ Yet, what do such goals mean when millions of our children are forced to work? How much actual attention is given to the circumstances of this segment of our future? How much consideration is given to the needs not only of this generation but future generations? How seriously do we care about human values when we see around innocent child laborers selling newspapers at traffic lights, serving tea at kiosks, or weaving a carpet? Is this the future we are talking about? How might we enhance the quality of our responses to unmet poor children’s needs? How might we begin to contribute more effectively to building cultures of peace and sustainable futures? No easy answers.

That the shameful practice of child labor should have played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset is not to be wondered at. The displaced working classes, from the seventeenth century on, took it for granted that a family would not be able to support itself if the children were not employed. The children of the poor were forced by economic conditions to work, as Charles Dickens, with his family in debtor's prison, worked at age 12 in the Blacking Factory. In 1840 perhaps only twenty percent of the children of London had any schooling, a number which had risen by 1860, when perhaps half of the children between 5 and 15 were in some sort of school, if only a day school (of the sort in which Dickens's Pip finds himself in Great Expectations) or a Sunday school; the others were working.

Child labor is a pervasive problem. Children work for a variety of reasons, the most important being poverty and the induced pressure upon them to escape from this plight. Though children are not well paid, they still serve as major contributors to family income in Pakistan. Schooling problems also contribute to child labor, whether it is the inaccessibility of schools or the lack of quality education which spurs parents to enter their children in more profitable pursuits. Traditional factors such as rigid cultural and social roles in Pakistan further limit educational attainment and increase child labor.

There are 19 million working children in Pakistan, 7 million below the age of 10 and 12 million between the ages of 10-14. Everyday sun sets by shoving over 100 children into the labor market. The number of child workers under 15 years is estimated to be not less than 8 million. Punjab accounts for 60% of the total child labor. More than two-thirds of child laborers are working in the agricultural sector. Of 20 million bonded laborers 7.5 million are children and 1.2 million children are bonded in the carpet factories. Nearly 250,000 children working in brick kilns are bonded laborers, driven into a miserable state by the fact that their entire families have been 'pawned' to the owners by virtue of their having pledged their labor in return for some money taken. Children are sometimes kidnapped to be used as forced labor.

The newly emerged affluent class in urban cities employs some 6.7% of female child workers in domestic help. These domestic workers generally have to work for 15 hours a day, seven days a week.

Bonded labor, a contemporary form of slavery according to the UN definition, unfortunately holds strong in certain sectors in Pakistan, such as brick manufacture, construction, sports goods manufacture and carpet-weaving.

Demand for child labor is so high that children are often sold by desperate parents. They are then forced to work long hours, day and night, unable to attend school, and often subject to abuse and malnourishment. This perpetuates a cycle of poverty since most of these children never get the education and training needed to obtain a livable wage.

As a peace educator, human rights activist and a father of eleven year old son, I am the first to admit that we have done nothing to halt child labor and just about 19 million child laborers continue to work in Pakistan. What inconsequential the government has done is measly cosmetics. This is just to show to the West that child labor is not involved in the production of export oriented goods. We have done nothing to remove the horrific and reckless conditions that push children to child labor. Rather than working together to help build a better world, in which poor children have the possibility to live, to laugh, to play, to share, to care and to transform into responsible citizens, we may fatalistically accept a foreclosed future. Rather than building intergenerational partnerships, the well being of children today and of successive generations may be stolen or colonized through our lack of quality responses.

We can, we must, and we should stop the exploitation of children. In 1999, when the member states of the ILO unanimously voted to adopt Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor, the world community made a commitment to stop the suffering of millions of children. It was recognized that ending the commercial exploitation of children must be one of humankind's top priorities. It was accepted as a cause that demands immediate attention and a high priority action. Caught in a nightmare that never seems to end, a significant part of Pakistan’s future endures the worst forms of child labor. More than just words and passing resolutions, child labor is a part of the reality of our world today. No one will say that children should suffer. No one will support that children should work 14 hours a day. But who will step forward to stop this? (www.asifjmir.com)

Saying Goodbye to Corruption

Corruption is an insidious plague that has a wide range of corrosive effects on society. It undermines democracy and the rule of law, leads to violations of human rights, distorts markets, erodes quality of life, and allows organized crime, terrorism and other threats to human society to flourish. As defined by Transparency International: “Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.” According to Kofi Annan, “Corruption hurts the poor disproportionately—by diverting funds intended for development, undermining a government’s ability to provide basic services, feeding inequality and injustice, and discouraging foreign investment and aid.”

The good news is that future of corruption is not so bright it will not entirely finish though.

No country is entirely free of corruption. Efforts to fight corruption encourage transparency and accountability, thanks to an increased understanding of corruption's social and economic costs. There is the need for expanding the econometric framework, as well as to more general future research directions and policy implications in the field of governance.

Corruption is principally a governance issue, a failure of institutions and a lack of capacity to manage society by means of a framework of social, judicial, political and economic checks and balances. Good governance and globalization (at both the country as well as at the city level) do matter for performance in terms of access and quality of delivery of infrastructure services.

Corruption is deeply embedded in the political culture and poverty of developing countries. Regulatory bodies are particularly vulnerable to corruption as they have the power to make key decisions on profit-making activities. Corrupt regulatory bodies can thus dangerously impede economic development.

Discretion creates more opportunities for corruption than where regulatory requirements are laid out through clear, precise and formal rules. Debate about corruption tends to focus almost exclusively on the receivers of corruption, rather than the purveyors. Corruption is alive and well and living in myriads of places. Bribery is simply the way business is done in developing countries.

Within such countries' political dynamics, corruption figures as a very critical element.
It increases the number of capital projects undertaken and tends to enlarge their size and complexity. The result is that, paradoxically, some public investment can end up reducing a country’s growth because, even though the share of public investment in gross domestic product (the total of all goods and services produced in a country in a given year) may have risen, the average productivity of that investment is dropped.

For a private enterprise, getting a contract to execute a project, especially a large one, can be very profitable. Therefore, managers of these enterprises may be willing to offer commission to politicians who help them win the contract. Conversely, in many cases the act of bribery may not start with the enterprise but with the officials who control the decisions. It is apparently impossible to win a government contract in most developing and under developed countries without first paying a bribe. Interestingly, the laws of certain major industrial countries regard commissions paid by domestic enterprises to foreign politicians as not only legal but also tax deductible.

In some of these phases, a strategically placed high-level official or elected leader can manipulate the process to select a particular project. He can also tailor the specifications of the design to favor a given enterprise by, for example, providing inside information to that enterprise at the time of issuance of tender.

The enterprise that pays the commission rarely suffers from the payment of the bribe, since it is fairly simple to recover that cost. First, if corrupt officials of winning the bidding competition assure it, the enterprise can include the cost of the commission in its bid. Second, it can reach an understanding with the influential official that the initial low bid can be adjusted upward along the way, presumably to reflect modifications to the basic design. Third, it can reduce its spending on the project by the amount of the bribe by skimping on the quality of the work performed and the materials used. Fourth, if the contract is stipulated in a cost-plus fashion, the enterprise can recover the cost of the commission by overpricing.

The first step towards tackling corruption is preventing it. In attempting to prevent the laundering of proceeds of corruption mechanisms need to set up to review suspicious transactions, and analyze financial information.

Transparency and accountability in matters of public finance must also be promoted, and specific requirements established for the prevention of corruption, in particularly critical areas of the public sector, such as public procurement.

Citizens have the right to expect a high standard of conduct from their public servants. They also have to participate in preventing public corruption. For these reasons there is a need to actively encourage and promote the involvement of non-governmental and community based organizations, as well as, other elements of civil society, and to raise public awareness of corruption and what can be done about it.

There is a requirement for the prevention of corruption in the judiciary. Decision-making should be entrusted to committees rather than individuals. Although this adds to the cost of regulation, it may eventually save money by facilitating mutual monitoring and accountability.

New attitudes, better financial systems, prosecution of the guilty, better management of diamonds and real accountability to the people … this is the agenda for change. In taking it forward, the leading role must obviously be taken by the people and Government. But tackling corruption effectively requires a real focus, coordinated action and shared responsibility. Everyone’s energies must be thrown behind this anti-corruption strategy. It is the key to a better future for the people of poor countries. (www.asifjmir.com).

Consumer Rights

From the lost Constitution of 1973 to its current structure, all incumbents have been cutting holes with amendments to fortify their power. No effort has ever been made to consolidate the power of people. Never has there been any attempt to include the parts that protect consumer rights. Thus and so, the Constitution of Pakistan does not guard the consumer rights of the citizens of Pakistan. Implicitly, first come the rights of the citizens, and then comes the Constitution. If a constitution contains adequate procedures to protect rights, it can be legitimate even if it was not consented to by everyone; and one that lacks adequate procedures to protect human rights is unfair even if it was consented to by a majority.

Future is on our head with the concept of globalization that is changing the focus of governance. Instead of territory, human rights are now getting significance. And consumer rights happen to be the component of larger human rights program.

Consumer means people. By barely defining consumers as customers, we bar millions of citizens who due to lacking resources can’t buy. So consumers are citizens. Moreover, everybody has to consume to survive—consumption is a natural process for human survival. Thus, everyone is a consumer by default.

Consumers are the largest economic group in any country’s economy, affecting and affected by almost every public and private economic decision. But they are also the only important group that is not effectively organized, whose views are not heard. Therefore, the Government, the highest spokesman for all people, has a special obligation to the consumer’s needs.

The consumer rights have a universal significance as they symbolize the aspirations of the poor and disadvantaged. On this basis, the United Nations, in April 1985, adopted its Guidelines for Consumer Protection. They include: 1) the protection of consumers from hazards to their health and safety; 2) the promotion and protection of the economic interests of consumers; 3) access of consumers to adequate information to enable them to make informed choices according to individual wishes and needs; 4) consumer education on the environmental, social and economic impacts of consumer choice; 5) availability of effective consumer redress; and 6) freedom to form consumer and other relevant groups and the opportunity to present their views in decision-making processes affecting them.

No legislator, no political scientist, no intellectual, and no so-called constitutional expert ever provided a new, realistic and philosophically rigorous theory of constitutional legitimacy that justifies both translating the Constitution according to the needs of people and, where that need is vague or open-ended, construing it so as to better protect the rights of the people. Consequently, even the general principles defined by the UN could not be realized.

The consumer protection issues are seldom included in the agendas of utility service providers, most of which are in public sector. Consequently, the rights of poor Pakistanis are being trampled even by public sector organizations like WAPDA, Sui Gas, and PTCL, to mention a few. Little attention is given to consumer protection policies, and consumer friendly market structures, incentive regulation, tariff regimes, deregulation and competition.

Consumer issues can be chronicled even before partition under the colonial rule that established monopoly regimes, when consumers had no voice at all. Same structure was adopted after independence and it continues on and on disregarding the advent of competition, which has given rise to greater concern about consumer welfare. Hence the consumers in Pakistan today feel that they remain to be excluded from the decision-making process. They believe that they are still far off from the regulatory process that provides them no opportunity to influence or even overturn critical decisions. And so consumer perceptions and opinions about the marketplace scenario are depressing.

In Pakistan lack of choice among alternative service providers due to a single or dominant operator is making consumers vulnerable. They have no right, whatsoever, for intervention where dominant operators are protected by the government, where there is no quality of service performance requirements and where dominant operators are authorized to set tariffs without rationale and beyond reach of the majority.

An informed consumer is an empowered consumer. Regulators should make every effort to empower consumers. Specific educational mass-media campaigns are needed to educate consumers about their rights. School textbooks are another useful but neglected channel to educate consumers about their rights. Education is a powerful, albeit, long-term action to shape people’s attitudes about enforcing their rights as consumers.

Activities that regulators should consider in setting up the consumer agenda include: establishing customer services, creating mass awareness of consumer rights, enforcing those rights, creating nationwide offices to address consumer issues and offering dispute resolution systems.

India is getting a global reputation for the rapid development of its consumer movement. Today that is perhaps the only country in the world, which has exclusive courts for consumer redressal of grievances that too within 90 to 150 days. One of the greatest achievements of the Indian consumer movement is the enactment of the dynamic consumer law in 1986: COPRA. Coming 39 years after Independence, it has acknowledged the rampant consumer abuses, including those of the government owned public utilities like telephones, transport, power etc.

Pakistan does not have a cohesive national consumer policy. Neither it has a national consumer protection law. The Federal List in the Constitution does not include the issue of consumer protection. Perceptibly, the provinces also don’t have consumer protection laws. The federal capital promulgated a consumer protection law in 1995 but was never implemented. Since the State has not provided any protection mechanism that consumers could use to protect them, hence they feel very helpless. Controversial amendments or litigious issues aside, our legislators ought to think about people and at least give a national consumer protection law. (www.asifjmir.com)

Choice for Survival

Ever since independence of Pakistan technology has sneaked in tardily. Paradoxically, these years have produced equally strident laments concerning the state to which Pakistan’s education has sunk. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.

When information technology was approaching in the sixties the US changed the school curricula for preparing students for the future. Contrarily we continue to turn our eye from the need to adopt new technologies and consequently our students are not being prepared (IT students included) to live in a competitive world.

We have managed to survive without adoption of IT for forty years. It will be impossible to continue to exist even for a day if we failed to adopt the approaching technologies. For instance Nanotechnology—examining the world at a millionth of meter and utilizing the ability to manipulate our universe at a molecular or atomic perspective—has united scientists across developed world in the belief that the worlds of medicine, computers, biotechnologies and eventually all manufacturing will never be approached in the same way again. We can’t afford to respond as laggards and follow the same doom which ancient civilizations faced. They perished for resistance to new technologies.

In ancient Greece then, all of the energy sources in use today, with the exception of nuclear power and hydroelectric power (both used exclusively to produce electricity) were known, available, and in limited use. Why then did it take so many centuries for energy sources and technology to come together to produce the Industrial Revolution?

From ancient Greece into the early Renaissance technological development was not only frowned upon, it was downright discouraged. People with money did not invest in it. It was socially unacceptable for the elite to involve themselves in what they considered a degrading activity.

The Greek philosophers, for all of their delving into how the world was made up and how things worked, had a strong aversion to the development of technology. They called it banausikon, meaning, fit for mechanics. It was considered a filthy business beneath the dignity of any intelligent, thinking person. Aristotle held that industries that earned wages degraded the mind and were unworthy of the free man. He would not stoop so low as to attempt to verify by measured observation his reasoning concerning physics or dynamics. As a result, some bad science went unchallenged for almost 2,000 years.

The Museum and Library at Alexandria, established in 290 BC by the rulers of Egypt, was a research facility that attracted scientists from around the known world. Researchers would use valves, expanding gases, solar thermal power, cams, screws, pulleys, levers, springs, siphons, and cogs—the basics for an industrial revolution. They developed double-action pumps and a compressed air cannon. It was there that Hero demonstrated a steam reaction turbine in 60 AD. The Library at Alexandria could have been an ancient model for Silicon Valley, but the research did not lead to improved manufacturing processes, better machines for industry or agriculture, or even for increasing wealth. Rather it was used to amuse royalty or to amaze worshipers in temples.

A valid argument can be made that metallurgy, manufacturing processes, and transportation facilities were too primitive to allow for exploitation of energy and technology at that time. But, absent the social barrier to technological development that existed, it is likely that the great minds, the available wealth, and the power concentrated in the likes of Alexander the Great, and the Roman Emperors could have laid the groundwork for a much earlier development and diffusion of technology.

We are accustomed to resist technological change with full force. We not only refuse to recognize it; we close our eyes to evade it. The attitude that we demonstrate confirms our nasty characterization as a nation of laggards.

Embracing technology is a laudable objective for which our society must aspire. It should provide a classic demonstration of the principles of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle and attempt to explain the pros and cons of investing in new technology. It must transform itself as innovators, early adopters, and not as laggards on a technology adoption timeline.

We should inculcate education of technology at every level of learning. If we claim to know more about how people learn, if we have better tools for facilitating learning, why do so many studies of technology in education show no significant difference from traditional methods? Why are we producing graduates less able to cope with the issues facing them?

Making matters worse, the criteria for success have changed. Our institutions were designed not for an industrial society. Now we've entered the Information Age. Increasingly, even blue-collar jobs require critical thinking, rather than monotonous task performance. To meet these demands, our graduates need different competencies than we typically provide. Intuitively, one would expect technology to be a powerful tool for meeting these new requirements.

We are entering a world in which jobs are requiring technological competency--a world in which they must continue to update their occupational and technological skills in order to be successful. We must enable them to become technologically competent. We must take advantage of the capacity of technology to enhance our traditional classroom presentations and to engage our students in active learning.

Pakistan’s decision-makers must focus on new challenges and issues instead of waiting for emergencies to react. They need to focus more on policy than management issues. They need to be knowledgeable about what rest of the world is doing to achieve change. They should know that change and implementing technology often go hand in hand. The key to success in both is a thorough, inclusive planning process. The disregard of new technologies by ancient civilizations offers us a choice: to embrace new technologies or perish. (www.aifjmir.com)

Globalization: Bumping into the poor

The urbanization of poverty is being propelled by a tremendous increase in the transnational movement of people and capital. The rapid transfer of money and jobs to cities and countries where cheap labor can be found has fueled by a race to the bottom. For the urban poor who are impacted by this race, there are no winners, and the losers will most likely find themselves among the projected two billion people who will be living in slums by 2030.

Hardest hit by globalization are women and children - the most vulnerable of urban dwellers. Poor women are becoming increasingly marginalized as the feminization of poverty manifests itself in many parts of the world.

The positive aspects of globalization, including greater longevity, increased literacy, lower infant mortality and wider access to infrastructure and social services, mask the unfortunate truth that these benefits are not being shared equally. The effects of globalization on cities – both positive and negative – need to be better understood if public policy is to be effective in bettering the lives of those who live in them.

Under globalization, manufacturing activities in cities have been relocated offshore to the developing economies whose lower labor costs, lower taxes and less rigorous environmental protection enable higher profits. The socio-economic consequences of globalization weaken access to basic infrastructure and housing, fuel the creation and expansion of slums, and reinforce the negative environmental and health impacts affecting the urban poor in many cities.

Demographic shifts, including transnational migration and poor integration of ethnic and racial groups, add impetus to these changes. So, too, does the ability (or not) of households and individual people to cope with rapid economic change. Those on the losing end of these changes can easily find themselves confronted with the loss of jobs, and the consequent sale of assets in order to survive, converting them into the new poor, leaving them even more insecure and vulnerable in the face of economic change.

The last two decades have witnessed a transformation of the global economy, which has led to vast economic, social and political realignments in many countries and cities. The trend towards open markets has enriched some countries and cities tremendously, while others have suffered greatly. World trade in this period has grown from about US$580 billion in 1980 to US$6.3 trillion in 2004—11-fold increase. Flows of capital, labor, technology and information have also increased tremendously.

Among the losers in this race are female workers, whose wage levels and working conditions have declined as a result of the dropping of barriers to footloose industries. This same dynamic is evident inside individual cities as well, leaving many people unable to obtain stable jobs and incomes. This leads to changes in patterns of social inclusion and exclusion across cities, often along racial and ethnic lines.

The distribution of the fruits of globalization reflects private-sector judgments about the expected financial returns to these investments, their security, and the economic and political environments in which they occur. Corporations have tended to concentrate direct investment in ten countries, including China, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and Thailand. In stark comparison, the poorest countries have seen no such investment.

The vacuum created by footloose industries is rarely filled by job opportunities for the poor. Rather, any new jobs tend to be in knowledge-intensive industries, many requiring university-level education.

The race also occurs within individual cities, resulting in job losses where large segments of the labor force have to shift from one sector to another. The urban poor are losing jobs and benefits and must now find other income-generating opportunities in the informal sector, which offer no security or benefits.

The loss of secure jobs with secure community roots fosters an informalization of the urban economy, with more people eking out a living in unregulated sectors. Several economic processes converge to informalize employment and other aspects of urban life. The closing of formal-sector enterprises often coincides with the downsizing of ancillary industries and services. As one industry declines – as with light engineering in Karachi - incomes in the city as a whole reduce. Former employees are no longer able to purchase services on the street; hence, street vendors also suffer. Simultaneously, if utility tariffs increase, other enterprises suffer and are forced to reduce their operations or close altogether.

Globalization has set cities against each other in a desperate competition for a share of highly mobile capital and trade. The needs and desires of global capital must be balanced with policies based on the needs of the region’s own inhabitants. Otherwise, any effort to alleviate urban poverty will expire, as meaningless gestures that provide little more than temporary relief – and the gap between rich and poor will continue to grow larger.

Jobs, consumption patterns and opportunities for social mobility are all easily influenced by external factors. This instability can be manifested in both national and local contexts through at least four important channels: patterns of investment, labor markets, prices and public expenditures. Moreover, they occur in different locations within the city, creating patchworks of decay, renewal, and economic revitalization. The challenge for national and local authorities is to identify which kinds of changes are occurring, or better still, which types of changes can be anticipated, in order to consider whether there are measures that can cushion or mitigate these impacts. To do that, changes must be anticipated and capital set aside to deal with them.

While governments may feel their budgets are severely constrained, they need to apply discipline to save some of their resources for these future needs. This does not mean borrowing and thereby passing on debts to future generations. It means saving for the future. In reality, this saving is an insurance policy against future unknowns. Having such resources at hand allows decision-makers to face the future more confidently and to smooth out the impacts of volatile changes in the global economy at large. (www.asifjmir.com)