Pages
Topic Discussion I
Politics of Hard Choices
Political Transition and Economic Restructuring
Room 4
(10 of 12 pages)
The other important question is how can international reform mandates be driven
from affecting domestic achievements. This is an extremely important question for developing countries. I think
there is no easy answer for this except that the country who takes the reform choice must fully understand the
elements which give it a comparative advantage and the elements that they can successfully build on in order to
merge itself and it's country efficiently and effectively to the world economy. Usually an effective and viable
route towards this starts from understanding the regional setting and how can this country find it's place within
it's own region and to the international and world economy in general. It is impossible for countries like ours
to think about finding it's own place among the giants directly to the international market without really going
through that local and regional market. There will have to be observed a dynamic efficiency and continuous feedback
from the actual performance in the real world to the planning and structuring the process of integration to the
world economy and to the region. That makes it a complicated process but it is possible. Every country has ways
and means of correctly and timely keeping economic efficiency in the economy. You must be strict in yourself and
to observe efficiency and to understand continuously that element of strength that you have and be able to draw
on them.
How can a civil society and interest group participate [inaudible]…in social and back between government. We in
Yemen have tried to work on this issue and have found that it is critical. It is extremely important to create
partnership and create a sense of ownership among all parties. We tried to create general frameworks towards that.
In the end we found out that we probably at the start had to organize this process is a more precise manner so
we created a partnership between the government and the private sector. We have now a forum that meets regularly
between the government and the private sector where the private sector is able to complain, express their worries
and opinions and the government takes this into account and builds it into legislation etc systematically. The
rule of the civil society cannot in my view be structured in a rigid format but by allowing these democratic practices
and by making the reform process the business of everyone in society you can find so many rules for the civil society
to work in directly and indirectly that the government itself, once it has identified that, will insist and look
at how we can do this.
The last point is how can short term hardship be cushioned by social safety net. There are many ways to do this.
There are destructive ways and they are the ones that help the people but give them direct help so that it does
not encourage them in the restructuring process to reintegrate themselves into the economy and the labor market
in an efficient manner that will enable them later on to become part of the regular economic system. That happens
when you give people direct assistance that does not have a real time limit. But a better way is to prepare the
people to integrate themselves efficiently and effectively to the market and to the economy. For example training
the people, creating training programs and creating work programs. In Yemen we have extensive social safety nets
which involves creating small jobs, financing a small project, training programs and financing labor in terms of
projects.
Speaker: I think that through the discussions we've had that we find that each country has it's own personal
experience because society has it's own characteristics. In Yemen we have gone a long way towards the democratic
process and has achieved certain strides but democracy is not going to substitute our daily bread and therefore
Yemen faces a good number of problems. First of all illiteracy, demographic growth, etc. These are basic things
which Yemen is confronting obstacles in. Yemen is not an industrial country and we have to take this into account.
The other side is that the private sector is not able to carry out the services carried out by the state and therefore
there are difficulties in that part. Therefore any democratic society should take into account the social balance.
The problems facing Yemen today the international community should help it in finding solutions. We must have a
strategy to study and to lay down programs for industrial development so that we are able in turn to raise an awareness
among societies of democracy in this practice. We in the trade unions have faced when we carried out the awareness
campaign in the elections of 1997 a good number of people were upset. Social development should go hand in hand
with demographic growth. There are a good number of problems in Yemen and we in the trade unions are facing problems
from globalization and privatization. We have nothing to privatize. I talked to the representative of the IMF.
We must have industrial development and then go forward to the second part of privatizing it. So this should be
taken into account. The question of setting up civic institutions is important because this is the closest thing
to the layman and the illiterate person so that he is able to understand through….that women's participation is
important. Again all these are elements which should compliment each other.
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