'Austerity kills'

This is apropos a Business Recorder op-ed "Austerity kills" carried by this newspaper on Saturday. The writer, Bakhtiyar Kazmi, like other Pakistani economists, seems to be greatly impressed by Nobel laureates American economist Joseph Stiglitz. He has, for example, quoted Stiglitz as saying: "The first is that capital market liberalization - opening up developing countries' financial markets to surges in short-term "hot" money - is dangerous. It was not an accident that the only two major developing countries to be spared a crisis were India and China. Both had resisted capital market liberalization."

It needs to be mentioned here that Stiglitz, who is widely known as an expert on downside of globalization, has often argued that capital market liberalization and exchange safe regimes are always characterized by greater risks and little or no rewards. In one of his works Stiglitz has impressively argued that "the predictions of the advocates of capital market liberalization are clear, but unfortunately, historical experience has not been supportive."