'Asian values provide environment for growth'

JAKARTA (JP): Former Australian prime minister Robert (Bob) Hawke said on Thursday night that Asian values provided the environment rather than the cause of Asia's economic success.

"I have the feeling that Asian values have provided the environment in which tough decisions can be made and can be made to stick," said Hawke at an Indonesian capital market conference.

Hawke said that Asian values alone could not have produced such success. It required the government's decisions and policies; a combination of economic fundamentals and intervention.

Though Hawke considered it unrealistic to talk about Asian values as if Asia was a single entity, he listed several characteristics which could be associated with those values: The importance of education, inter-generational responsibility, social collectivism and the ready acceptance of authority.

He said that many Asian governments' policies had meant real or perceived hardships. For example, on savings and investment, critical to a nations welfare, instant gratification has been denied for the expectation of long-term benefits.

"I can tell you as an ex-prime minister that persuading your citizens to get their time-scales right -- to understand that pain must usually precede gain -- is one of the more difficult tasks in politics," he said at the two day conference, held for the 19th anniversary of the Indonesian capital market.

He said that apprehension has developed in many of the Western countries over Asian economic growth: an ambivalent debate has emerged on the role of the Asian values. The ambivalence occurs because these values are seen in both a positive and negative light.

"On the positive side, the miracle myth-makers of the West explain growth rates, which are spectacular by their own experience, as being the result of applying Asian values. The downside is highlighted as the tolerance of authoritarian regimes and practices deemed to be unacceptable by Western standards," he said.

Hawke said, however, that Asian values would not remain constant. Its economic growth and market expansion would produce irresistible pressures for political liberalization.

According to Hawke, Western commentators have tended to ignore a factor which has been central to the readiness of Asians to accept necessary, and perhaps tough, policy decisions.

East Asian leadership, he said, has accepted the principle of shared growth.

The 1993 World Bank report confirmed that the top performing Asian economies had been successful at sharing the fruits of growth.

"The high performing Asian economies are the only economies that have high growth and declining inequality. Moreover, the fastest growing economies, Japan and the four Tigers, are the most equal," he said.

The World Bank said that equality meant that human welfare had increased dramatically as measured by social and economic indicators; such as life expectancy, decreasing numbers of people living in absolute poverty and education.

"Whether the fact of shared growth is seen as a reflection of Asian values, it has certainly been both a facilitator of, and a cohesive element in, the outstanding economic performance of East Asia," he said.

East Asians, he said, are entitled to take account of their better record in this matter when the West preaches to them about the downside of Asian values, particularly on human rights.

He said that Asians can argue rightly that an absolutely fundamental and universal human right is the right of citizens to share in the growing real wealth of their country.

"East Asians are especially entitled to raise their eyebrows when the preaching emanates from the United States -- the richest democracy and the loudest in its admonitions to the rest of the world about basic human rights," he said.

According to Hawke, in the United States income inequality worsened dramatically over the past twenty years and now stands at its lowest levels since records have been kept.

"Among the industrialized nations, America has the greatest division between rich and poor and the greatest deterioration over the past two decades," he said.

He noted that when it came to the sanctity of human life the United States does not speak from a position of strength. Every independent analyst has identified poor gun control laws in the U.S. as the principal cause of death from firearms in that country. There were 39,500 deaths from firearms in 1994, an increase of 64 percent in less than thirty years.

He said that these considerations did not escape the attention of East Asians when they were being lectured by the West. Similarly they were perplexed when they looked at the brutal record of European powers in Asia and the historical timetables of those nations, and the United States, in achieving some of the human rights that they demanded should be introduced immediately in all the countries of East Asia.

He called on everyone interested in establishing a better international environment to understand the mind-set of the region which will increasingly hold the economic center stage. (13)

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