living peoples

Sun, 06 Sep 1998 15:55:50 +0300
Ahmet Cakmak (muhtar@escort.net.tr)

Dear Friends, in my previous paper, I refer to ' special conditions
overlapped'. Here, I want to explain what I mean by it.
The special conditions which gives me the impression that ' catching up'
or 'narrowing the gap substantially' is no longer impossible:
1) the money is there: There is a huge amount of money in the hands of a
few in the so-called developing countries. A recent example from my
country: In Turkey some entreprenours have bought sink banks by giving
600-700 million dollar ( this year). And I heard it that Siemens closed
one of its factories in England recently. This means 562 million dollars
for them, and they fell into hardship as a result of this. In my country
there are a new class of rich people who can buy something by giving
700-800 million dollars easilly. We have informed this from
newpapers..for example young business people who are the president of
some futball clubs. They can give this amount of money to transfer some
players.Especially during the privatisation they could paid amounts of 1
billion dollars to buy public enterprises.And, some ,lets say
traditional richs of developing countries are counted in top 100 of
world lists.
These are not surprise. In recent decades ( especially under neoliberal
policies) a rapid accumulation of wealth have realized in these
countries. Main factors played a role in this accumulation are low
wages, low taxes, increasing unregistered economy, tourism, gold,arm and
kokain trade,another kinds of mafian activities.
2) A substantial potantial for technological leap forward is there:
these countries have an industrial experience since 1940's even,older
than. They have engineers of chemistry,electronics ext...thousands of
engineers, dozens of universities and many researchers and experts.They
have an experienced business class. They have a well-educated yupii
army. And their industrial infra structure is not bad.
3) It is not too difficult 'doing by learning' now,in spite of the
efforts of core countries to prevent this by laws such as property
rights ext.A more rapid technological development by transfer,learn and
imitate is possible now thanks to these technologies themselves and
greater learning and imitating capacity of developing countries.

Ahmet Çakmak