In this year’s Freedom House Rankings, Taiwan beat Japan by placing 34th to Japan’s 38th. The mainland was way down the list at 128th, in the “mostly unfree” category (right down there with Lesotho, Yemen, and Gambia).
More at The Wall Street Journal.
I was pleased to note that France is pushing 50. That puts it where it fits best along with most of the other Third World nations. haha
Lets not equate economic freedom with liberty. Singapore as number two? I don’t think people such as James Gomez or JBJ would agree that Singapore has economic freedom.
I had the distinct pleasure of working in that country for my first job. Although my work was lauded by my colleagues, I made the mistake of professing my admiration for Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia and international financier George Soros. I then criticized Singapore’s own Internal Security Act saying that it was perhaps a necessity in the 1960s when Indonesia PM Sukarno’s confrontazi was destabilizing the region and the communists were everywhere in Malaysia, but not in the 21st Century. Needless to say, within one week I was dismissed - albeit with a nice severance package.
The government press in that city-state are heavily pro-PRC, anti-Israel and are headed by the country’s former internal police chief. Any Singaporean who criticizes the government is sued until they are bankrupt.
The liberal press always publishes glowing reports of the city-state. Look at Newsweek from two weeks ago. Although I am a die-hard liberal, kudos to the Wall Street Journal. In the past (not in the article link above) they have written on the darker sides of the Lion City and have written nice articles on Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam
That ranking is of very limited significance and the first couple of posts in this thread are misleading.
As was finally pointed out, it is only a ranking of economic freedom. Specifically, “the Index scores economic freedom in 10 categories, ranging from fiscal burdens and government regulation to monetary and trade policy.” Woopee doo. It says nothing about human freedom. And, does it take into account economic growth, unemployment, inflation, political stability and other such factors? I don’t think so. So, it may be useful as one factor of many for evaluating a country’s economic strength, but that’s it. . . just one factor of many.
And, while I’m no economist, it’s my understanding that the IMF gets all excited about the importance of this kind of info but they usually just cause problems by insisting so heavily on its importance at the exclusion of many other factors that may be more important.
I would say the people doing that rating have never tried to operate a small to medium sized business in Taiwan.
What sort of a term is “economic freedom” ? More meaningless gibberish for Guardian readers.
Their survey doesn’t claim to measure pollution, civil rights, or per-capita dog ownership, MT. It claims to measure economic freedom, nothing else. Deal with it. . . .
Mapodofu, I’ve got no quarrel with the rankings (or with you). I really didn’t pay much attention to them. I’m just saying that the title of this thread led me to believe this ranking might pertain to something meaningful. Upon discovering that it only relates to market freedom (that’s probably a better description Hexuan) I realized it’s not a terribly meaningful ranking.
After all, Thailand might have scored very well in this ranking in 1996. . . before the collapse. The IMF and many pro-globalization advocates from rich countries often blindly trumpet the merit of opening markets when economics is more complex than that and many countries economies would be devastated by opening their markets too quickly. But that matters little to the rich corporations and countries exerting the pressure on them.
I’m not saying that open markets are bad. I’m just saying it is wrong too get too excited about a ranking such as this becasue there are many other complex factors involved.
Economic freedom for who? I’d say at paying the pittance of the 6% tax rate here in Taiwan, I’m a lot more free than I would be in #3 New Zealand or the rest of the ‘Free’ countries. Like MT said, it only measures market freedoms for business investors - nothing more, nothing less. Most people don’t pay corporate taxes, which from reading the article are the only taxes they bother to measure. Those measures are meaningless to your average joe’s life and represent only economic freedom for corporations and business investors - which is fine if you want to rank the business-friendliest nations, but be honest about it. The title is definitely misleading.
Silencing dissent with impunity
Canberra Times
March 29, 2003
CAN THE concept of democracy be effectively transferred to countries with little experience of its workings?
That question has been lurking in the international background since the founding of the United Nations, and may well be driven to the surface by the current terrorist scenario. Dividing the world into good and bad on the basis of countries’ institutions is easy to attempt, but not so easy to achieve.
Singapore is a prime example of the difficulty of applying such a test, and Chris Lydgate’s account of how one man was broken by the methods it used shows that governments can silence dissent quite efficiently without attracting outright condemnation.
Ben Jeyaretnam was 45 and a successful lawyer and former judge in Singapore when he was invited, in 1971, to enter politics as the head of the Workers’ Party. Founded by a former Chief Minister, David Marshall, the party had fallen on hard times in the previous decade. The People’s Action Party, led by Lee Kuan Yew, had been in power for the same period, and had prospered under its public image as the creator of an independent Singapore.
The 1972 election result showed just how well. The People’s Action Party won all 69 seats, and the Workers’ Party an average 24 per cent of the votes in the 27 electorates it contested. Jeyaretnam’s only consolation was that it became the strongest opposition party. It took him another three elections to enter Parliament in 1981 as the first opposition candidate elected since 1963.
It was a significant victory, but he soon learned how difficult it would be to remain in his place. Lee Kuan Yew began immediately to reduce his influence by changing the appointment procedure for Citizens’ Consultative Committees and Residents’ Committees, the principal link between parliamentarians and their electors. They had been controlled traditionally by the local parliamentarian, but the chairmen and advisers would now be selected by the Prime Minister.
The Government clearly over-reacted to the slight hint of a developing democracy, but Jeyaretnam’s tactics did not help. He began to make allegations without substantiation, a characteristic that would dog his political career. In his first parliamentary debate he alleged that the People’s Action Party was using premises provided by the Government and that the Prime Minister had used police vehicles and personnel in his 1980 election campaign.
Challenged by Lee Kuan Yew to provide details, he had to admit that he was simply airing a rumour. Years later he admitted to the Straits Times newspaper that he should have done more homework, but he put it down to his personality. ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘That’s me fire from the hip.’ But he still asserted his right to ask questions even when he had no evidence to support them.
He increased his majority in the 1984 elections, but government determination to oust him also increased. A longstanding dispute about Workers’ Party funds re-emerged, and Jeyaretnam and Workers’ Party chairman Wong Hong Toy were retried, convicted and sentenced to three months in jail. An appeal reduced the sentence to one month. But it was accompanied by a S$5000 fine, sufficient to disqualify Jeyaretnam from Parliament.
A year later he had not only been barred from Parliament, but stripped of his licence to practise law. It was another 11 years before he could return to Parliament. Even then, at the age of 71, he was not free of the People’s Action Party noose. He was faced with eight libel suits from now Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong for his statements at an election rally, and finally required to pay S$100,000 and costs. Three more bankruptcy actions followed, and in 2001 he was again declared bankrupt and finally stripped of his parliamentary seat.
Does his story provide relevant indications of the prospects for democracy in developing countries? Lydgate, an American journalist who spent two years in Singapore, makes it clear that, while Jeyaretnam was his own worst enemy, he was the victim of a campaign by Lee Kuan Yew to crush opposition.
The Singapore Government finally used the more subtle technique of libel actions to bring down their opponent rather than the hammer blows used by neighbouring leader Dr Mahathir to oust his one-time deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, and imprison those demonstrating in support of him. Anwar was found guilty of abuse of power in 1999 and sentenced to six years in prison. A year later he was found guilty on charges of sodomy and sentenced to nine years.
Lydgate points out, however, that Singapore’s less confronting techniques can be just as effective. Discussing Jeyaretnam’s slipshod methods, he puts a cogent argument for such deficiencies. ‘One reason,’ he says, 'is that Jeyaretnam was cut off from the sorts of resources that politicians in most democracies take for granted. ‘He could not rely on advocacy groups, because there are no advocacy groups in Singapore. He could not rely on newspaper accounts, because there are no investigative reporters in Singapore. He had no money to pay researchers; potential volunteers were afraid of being associated with him. He had virtually no staff.’
This is an important and well-researched book, and its significance is well described by human-rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in his introduction.
'The criticisms of Singapore in the Western press are often misplaced: they focus on the laws against jaywalking in the streets and urinating in the lifts and dropping chewing-gum wrappers on the pavements, and they only make me wish we had similar laws in Britain.
However, the superficially clean image of the state serves to illustrate a more important truth that this book, by telling Ben Jeyaretnam’s story, brings to light: that suppression of well- intentioned dissent by a government bent on maintaining monopoly of its political power may be achieved within a democratic framework, as well as under a dictatorship.’
In a way, I understand this and while I agree with EOD, I might add, starting and running a business in Japan isn’t easy.
Economic Freedom is the ability to start a business with the fewest regulatory hurdles as possible with clear cut laws that don’t arbitrarily come into existence from the executive branch of gov’t. It is when the gov’t is not held hostage by special interest groups or politicized organizantions to take/overregulate from one group to provide another group with a material advantage.
It’s an interesting topic and explains a lot. Like why night/open air/day markets(largely shops and stalls paying little or no taxes) exist in developing countries but are rarely found in the size or frequency in developed countries.
Very few people in the world have ever really sought out the trials and tribulations of what goes into starting a small/medium sized business. Very little research goes into something that employs about 80% of the population of the US. Gov’ts have this vain notion that big business is good as it can tailor its policies to a very few people in return for a stamp or appearance of authority(This about sums up Japan). This is how my following examples come into play.
It’s a booming business in Hawaii to set up corporations there for Japanese nationals that will use the corporation to do business in Japan. The cost is 100 times greater in Japan than in Hawaii and they can do any business that a Japanese corporation can do. You literally have Japanese coming to Hawaii to start a corporation and take a vacation for less than it would cost them to just set up a corporation in Japan.
In Japan the number one comsumer bank is the post office, number 2 is Citibank(Yes, the US bank). Japanese banks are under the tight leash of the ministry of finance. It pretty much sets all bank policy in Japan in much the same way that the MOF sets bank policy in Taiwan. So we aren’t offered a differentiated service, but the same plain vanilla flavor with a different name. Am I not the only exasperated that all banks in Taiwan have the exact same hours and days off, neither of which I find convenient.
It takes about 3-5 days I believe to set up a corporation in the US. In Taiwan it takes about 30-90 days. In the US most laws are not arbitrarily changed by executive degree(meaning some bueracrat somewhere didn’t like how one person was doing something, so he had a rule made), but are normally passed by legislative branch which is directly elected. In Peru the legislative branch was passing 100 laws a year, the executive branch was passing that many on average in a day.
If you actually looked around the world there is business, commerce and things being made everywhere(industry). Gov’ts normally tend to overlook this and put up additional barriers to entry, which at first may of had some validity(or maybe not), but soon become unworkable as more and more layers of these barriers come into existence. Most people would like to or choose to work with in the law, but what if the law is standing in the way of you making a living and feeding your family? I’m not talking breaking the law as we know it from the west, but such things as setting up a roadside vending stand, a small factory, or service industry(like bus routes/taxis). What are you going to do?
Check out Hernando De Soto’s(not the dead spanish guy either, this on’e Peruvian) “Other Path” and “Mystery of Capitalism, Why it succeeds in the west and fials everywhere else.”
CYA
Okami
Demnark (no 8) was above that former colony/repressive welfare state on the wrong side of the atlantic (USA no 10).
Speaking of freedom, take a look at thisinterview from last year. Talk about a real grilling. I would have paid to be in the room during this exchange. Could teach the local Straits Times a thing or two about REAL journalism. But, then again, the BBC is always world class.
In the annual report released by the Washington-based rights watchdog on Tuesday, Taiwan scored 91 out of 100, beating out France (90), the US (89) and South Korea (82).
^I think that says more about France, America, and SK. They probably suck in some areas.
Look for America’s rating to continue dropping.