Unfortunately, most Americans, as well as most other people of the world, are still convinced that economic growth itself will solve many of our problems. But this emphasis on development, narrowly defined as economic growth, has produced pernicious results, despite its many successes. Economic development often ignores people. This was wonderfully expressed by a president of Brazil, who said in the 1970s that the Brazilian economy was doing fine, but the people weren't faring so well. This was not unique to Brazil. It is not true, as President Kennedy said in the 1960s, that "a rising tide lifts all boats." As efficient as the market economy is in generating growth, it leaves many people out. It is necessary to undertake specific policies to change this.

Government policies are also necessary to protect inalienable rights, to promote good governance and democracy, to provide opportunities for all people to participate, and to protect the environment. When these things don't happen, BBSD does not occur. All too often, governments pursue economic policies that benefit those in government at the expense of the people, as in the Philippines, Zaire, and Brazil. Such policies not only concentrate the benefits of growth in a few hands but in many cases actually retard overall economic growth. Other governments, such as those in China, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan, that are committed to economic growth have run roughshod over human rights and excluded people from participating in decision making, all in the name of economic growth. All countries, including the United States, have acted as if there were no ecological limits to growth.

We find the results of these policies morally repugnant and unacceptable. When governments fall to adopt economic growth-oriented policies, as they have in much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, poverty and misery result. If they pursue growth by trampling fundamental human rights, as has happened in the communist world, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they diminish the human spirit. When growth is pursued at the expense of equity, it dooms large numbers of people to misery. When growth destroys the environment, endangers our health, and threatens our descendants' ability to live on this planet, it is difficult to see this as either sustainable or desirable.

So, we need a new goal. And we need to identify what governments must do to attain that goal. We are not convinced by the economic philosophy of laissez-faire that prevails in the United States at the end of the twentieth century. We profoundly disagree with this approach to solving our problems. Markets are wonderful institutions and can function with great efficiency, but unregulated markets do not lead to social justice, environmental sustainability, a good society, or BBSD. No doubt, the slave market functioned efficiently in the United States, and free-market economists of the day probably wrote about how the market equilibrated prices for slaves so that the supply equated the demand.
Slavery was not ended by market forces but by progressive, radical people who believed the system to be evil and unjust and were willing to give their lives to the struggle to end it. For this reason, much of the emphasis in this book is on what governments can and must do if BBSD is to be achieved.

What Is Broad-Based Sustainable Development?

Broad-based sustainable development has four components. The first is a healthy, growing economy that constantly transforms itself to maintain and enhance the standard of living. Second, the benefits of economic growth are equitably distributed; women, minorities, immigrants, the poor, and the handicapped get a fair deal from economic growth.
The third component includes respect for human rights, good governance, a healthy civil society of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and an increasingly democratic society. The fourth is sustainability, which means that in the process of economic growth, we don't destroy the environment-foul the air, poison the water, pollute soils, mine the resource base, or destroy places of natural beauty-so that our descendants can enjoy the same or a higher standard of living.

What is a broad-based sustainable world? Are we approaching it or moving away from it? The answer to the first question is easy. A broad-based sustainable world is a world at peace, where healthy, growing economies are undergoing structural transformation, the benefits of economic growth are widely shared, there is respect for human rights, all governments are democratic, and the world's natural environment is being conserved.

A healthy, growing global economy is one that produces rising living standards; jobs for those who are willing, able, and seeking to work; stable prices; balance of payments; and equilibrium among nations. Global structural transformation means increasing the productivity of low-technology and low-productivity countries so that their citizens can share in the benefits of modern life. If the benefits of this growth were widely shared, income inequalities and the incidence of poverty across and within countries would decline and measures of human development - life expectancy, literacy, and infant mortality-would improve. A broad-based sustainable international political system would require a federation of democratic nations. This voluntary organization of governments would protect human rights and would ensure the peace through a United Nations-controlled police force.

Defining a broad-based sustainable world is easy. Figuring out how to get there is much harder. How close are we to BBSD? It depends on whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty. There is little doubt that much progress has been made since the end of World War II. To begin with, we have not experienced a third world war, nor has atomic war occurred. By itself, this is an enormous achievement. World peace and the Bretton Woods order (1) ushered in dramatic economic growth on every continent. This is one of the striking accomplishments of humankind. Per capita incomes increased dramatically, prices were relatively stable, and balance-of-payment deficits were manageable. Real structural transformation took place. The share of gross domestic product (GDP) and employment in low-productivity agriculture declined, and the GDP in higher-productivity industry and services rose. Capital was redirected from capital-surplus regions, countries with more savings that can be invested at home, to capital-scarce regions, countries where savings are scarce relative to investment opportunities. New technology was introduced and increased productivity.

The benefits of this rapid economic growth have been widely shared, and the global incidence of poverty has fallen. One of the poorest and most populated regions in the developing world in 1960, East Asia (including China) has increased its share of world income dramatically. It has also experienced a rapid decline in the incidence of poverty.
There have also been dramatic improvements in human development. Between 1950 and 1990, combined life expectancy for men and women in developing countries increased from forty years to sixty-three years, the under-five mortality rate dropped from 280 per thousand to 100 per thousand, and the literacy rate increased from 46 percent on 1970 to 69 percent in 1992. Nothing like this has ever happened before!

We have achieved greater respect for human rights and for human freedom and democracy. National and international human rights organizations now operate in most countries and report regularly on human rights abuses. There is some evidence that this reporting can reduce and even stop gross abuses of human rights. During the 1970s, concern for human rights came to be an accepted part of the foreign policy of some of the industrialized countries, including the United States. With the end of the Cold War, some countries have been denied foreign aid on the basis of violations of human rights. The United Nations has sometimes imposed effective sanctions on nations judged guilty of egregious violations of human rights, such as South Africa. There has been progress in increasing governments' respect for human rights.

The world is much more democratic than it has ever been. Between 1974 and 1990, thirty countries underwent democratic transitions. Almost all the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are democratic. Countries in Africa are experiencing a move to democracy, and most of the former communist countries are more democratic.

We have made the least progress in developing an international political and economic order that is consistent with conserving the environment. But even here, some progress has been made. The United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio in 1992 was a step in the evolution of the global consensus to take the environment seriously. Even though no enforcement mechanism was established, a principle was established that no nation has the right to pollute another nation's environment.

Evidence of Failure

Important problems remain. The global economy has become more unstable, and its growth has slowed dramatically. The two oil price shocks of the 1970s and the debt crises and recessions of the 1980s and 1990s have had brutal impacts on the developing world. In the mid-1990s, poor countries owed debts of $1.4 trillion to rich countries. The rich countries insisted that these debts be serviced, no matter how much privation and suffering it caused. In two regions of the developing world, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, the 1980s was a decade of declining living standards.

The United Nations Conference on Social Development, held in Copenhagen in 1995, painted a grim picture of life in the poor countries. There are more poor and hungry people in the world than at any time in history. More than a billion people live in conditions of absolute poverty, which means that they cannot satisfy their most basic needs: work, food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and culture. Seventy percent of these are women. They don't even have access to safe drinking water, much less a minimally adequate diet. Malnutrition in the young creates permanent, irreversible brain damage so that malnourished children grow up to be less than fully human. This occurs at a time when the world produces enough food for everyone, and the problem facing many countries is food surpluses.
Two million children die each year from infectious diseases, which could be prevented at very little cost. Eighty million children do not attend primary school and thus will grow up illiterate and unable to function in a literate world.

Many governments around the world-- in Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, parts of the former Soviet Union, and Cambodia-have collapsed. This makes development impossible. In the decade of the 1980s, virtually the only developing countries that did well were in East Asia. The problems associated with reforming the economies of the former communist countries seem particularly intractable.

There are also serious economic troubles in the industrialized countries. Economic insecurity in the United States increased in the last part of the twentieth century. In the post-World War II period, blue- and white-collar workers came to expect that they would get good jobs upon finishing school, keep those jobs for the rest of their lives, and experience a rising standard of living. They expected to own their own homes, have health insurance, own cars, and be able to take annual vacations. Beginning in the 1970s, these expectations failed to be realized. Real hourly earnings in private nonagricultural industries began falling in 1974. Real median family money income (the midpoint at which half the families are below the median and half above) fell from 1979 to 1993. (2) This decline occurred despite the fact that two family members were in the labor force rather than one, as had been the case in the 1950s and 1960s. So in the 1990s, two income earners working a total of eighty hours a week generated less income than one income earner had been able to earn in forty hours in an earlier period. The percentage of persons living below the poverty level in the United States rose from 11.7 percent in 1979 to 15.1 percent in 1993. (3)

Corporations began downsizing and permanently laying off both blue-collar and white-collar workers in great numbers. Many formerly prosperous industrial cities became economically depressed as plants closed and industry relocated. Workers in the United States could no longer count on keeping good jobs throughout their lives.

Income inequality in the United States also grew in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980, the poorest 20 percent of the people received 5 percent of income, whereas in 1991, their share had fallen to 3.8 percent. The richest 20 percent received 41.5 percent of income in 1980, and this had grown to 46.5 percent in 1991. (4) There was some evidence that income inequality was also increasing in other industrialized countries.

In the last few years of the twentieth century, the world economy seems to be moving back to an international political and economic order like that created after World War I. We are in danger of recreating the disastrous circumstances of the period between the two world wars. In fact, the present can be seen as another interwar period. We have to look at the changes that are necessary to preserve peace and prevent World War III.

The parallels to the period between World War I and World War II are frightening. Rich countries are insisting that poor countries repay all their debts, just as the United States and the Allies imposed onerous war-debt repayments on Germany and just as the United States imposed impossible repayment on its allies after World War I. The United States and its allies refused to buy the exports of these countries in order to protect their own domestic industries. This whole system had disastrous consequences.

There is strong support for trading blocs and protectionism - governments using tariffs and quotas to protect infant industries, regions, and people from the instability accompanying free trade-just as there was after World War I. The United States is no longer able to serve as the hegemonic or dominant power in the international economy after the end of the Cold War, just as Britain was no longer able to play that role after World War I.

There is an all too close similarity between what is happening in Russia today and what happened in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. Russia has lost a war (the Cold War), has lost much of its territory, has seen the military disgraced, has lost faith in the dominant ideology, and has seen the middle class destroyed by runaway inflation. The Russian economy is in shambles, there is widespread decadence, crime is rampant, organized crime controls large sectors of the economy, weak leadership is trying to establish democracy in a country that has been authoritarian for centuries, and Russia is receiving little help from the West. This is similar to what happened to Germany after World War I. Will this lead to an outburst of national socialism in Russia, similar to that which occurred in Germany?

These circumstances led to the Great Depression, the spread of fascism, and World War II. Unless we learn from history, we may be damned to repeat it. These circumstances have also led to cynicism and defeat about the prospects for global development. One of our purposes in writing this book is to hold out a hopeful vision of a better future for all humanity. We present evidence of the progress that has already been made and introduce the policies that need to be followed if broad-based sustainable development is to be achieved. Our policy recommendations are based on what we have learned over the last generation of development work and research.

Because we have worked in and done research on sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the states of the former Soviet Union, and because none of us has worked in or researched in the countries of North Africa or the Middle East, we felt more comfortable using examples only from the regions we are familiar with. We apologize in advance for this shortcoming.

The book is written from an interdisciplinary perspective, with the assumption that the reader does not have prior training in economics, political science, sociology, or ecology. All the terms that may be unfamiliar are defined the first time they are used in the chapters.

1. The Bretton woods conference of July 1944, attended by representatives of forty-four nations, resulted in the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
2. 2, Economic Report ofthe President, 1995, 310.
3. Economic Report of the President, 1995, 310.
4. Bread for the World Institute, Hunger 1994 (Silver Spring, Md.: Bread for the World Institute, 1994), 170.

From James H. Weaver, Michael T. Rock, and Kenneth Kusterer's: Achieving Broad-Based Sustainable Development: Governance, Environment and Growth with Equity. Kumarian Press. West Hanford, Connecticut, 1997.

Achieving BBSD: A Basis for Hope (pp. 278-9)

For the last two centuries, markets and capitalism have been extending their reach around the globe. The collapse of communism, rapid technological change, and the internationalization of capital, production, and consumption are creating the possibilities for BBSD on a worldwide scale.

Markets are wonderful institutions; they can function with great efficiency and have played an important role in benefiting humankind. But unregulated markets do not lead to social justice or a good society. Unfortunately, there appears to be no alternative to capitalism in the world today. But capitalism is surely not the final product of human imagination and creativity; someday it will be replaced by a more just, more participatory, and more sustainable system. Unfortunately, not even the outlines of this new system are visible yet. This should not be surprising.

People do not design political-economic systems in the abstract. No one designed the market economy. When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he was the first person to put it all together and understand how a market economy operated. But he was reporting on what was happening, not designing it.

No one can design the system that will succeed capitalism. We can only study and make recommendations about how to move toward a different and better system. The two distinctive economic institutions of capitalism-private ownership of the means of production and markets as the mechanism to allocate most resources-will no doubt continue in the new system. But the new system must transcend the present system in which consumers and producers pay only the private costs of their activities and dump the social costs, such as pollution, onto the society. Social costs must be paid by the people producing those costs. We must move to a system of production in which fewer and ultimately no wastes are created, in which everything is recycled. We are beginning to do that as we move toward a dematerialization of production and consumption. We must ensure that the benefits of growth are made available to all people.

What is needed today is a new burst of social creativity like that which occurred after World War II. Many of us have been the beneficiaries of the present international political and economic order. Now it is time for us to create a new one that will serve our descendants equally well.