Op-Ed Contributor
The Senate’s Next Task: Ratifying the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty By MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
Published: December 28, 2010
JUST a few weeks ago, the fate of the New Start nuclear arms treaty seemed to hang by a thread. But since last week, when the United States Senate ratified the treaty, which reduces the size of the American and Russian nuclear stockpiles, we can speak of a serious step forward for both countries. I hope this will energize efforts to take the next step to a world free of nuclear weapons: a ban on all nuclear testing.
In the final stretch, President Obama put his credibility and political capital on the line to achieve ratification. That a sufficient number of Republican senators put the interests of their nation’s security, and the world’s, above party politics is encouraging.
The success was not without cost. In return for the treaty’s ratification, Mr. Obama promised to allocate tens of billions of dollars in the next few years for modernizing the American nuclear weapons arsenal, which is hardly compatible with a nuclear-free world.
Missile defense remains contentious. During the ratification debate, many senators objected to the treaty’s language about the relationship between offensive and defensive arms, which the new agreement takes from the first Start treaty, signed in 1991. Others tried to scuttle ratification by complaining that New Start did not limit tactical nuclear weapons.
These attacks were fended off. Nevertheless, these problems clearly need to be discussed. There must be an agreement on missile defense. Tough negotiations are ahead on tactical nuclear weapons, and a realistic agreement is needed on the deployment of conventional forces in Europe. We shall see very soon whether all these issues were raised just for the sake of rhetoric, as a demagogical screen to maintain military superiority, or whether there is a real readiness to conclude agreements easing the military burden.
The priority now is to ratify the separate treaty banning nuclear testing. The stalemate on this agreement, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, has lasted more than a decade. I recall how hard it was in the second half of the 1980s to start moving in this direction. At the time, the Soviet Union declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. However, when the United States continued to test, we had to respond.
Even so, we insisted on our position of principle, calling for a total ban on nuclear testing under strict international control, including the use of seismic monitoring and on-site inspections.
In 1996 the United Nations General Assembly finally opened the test ban treaty for signing and ratification. But this pact has a particularly stringent requirement for its entry into force: every one of the 44 “nuclear technology holder states” must sign and ratify it.
As of today, 35 have done so, including Russia, France and Britain. Still, the list of countries that have not ratified remains formidable: It includes the United States, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, India, North Korea and Pakistan (the final three have not even signed). Each “rejectionist” country has its arguments, but all are not equally responsible for the stalemate. The process of ratification stalled after the United States Senate voted in 1999 to reject the treaty, claiming that it was not verifiable and citing the need for “stockpile stewardship” to assure the reliability of American weapons. The real reason was doubtless the senators’ desire to keep testing.
Nevertheless, in the 21st century only one country, North Korea, has ventured to conduct nuclear explosions. There is, in effect, a multilateral moratorium on testing. It is increasingly obvious that for the international community nuclear explosions are unacceptable.
In the meantime the preparatory committee for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization has built up a strong verification regime. Nearly 250 monitoring stations — around 80 percent of the number needed to complete the system — are now in operation. And the system proved its effectiveness by detecting the relatively low-yield nuclear explosions conducted by North Korea.
So should we, perhaps, be content with the virtual moratorium on nuclear testing?
No, because commitments that are not legally binding can easily be violated. This would render futile any attempts to influence the behavior of countries that have been causing so many headaches for the United States and other nations. The American senators should give this serious thought. As George Shultz, secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan, has said, Republicans may have been right when they rejected the treaty in 1999, but they would be wrong to do so again.
It is fairly certain that once the Senate agreed to ratification, most of the countries still waiting would follow. No country wants to be a “rogue nation” forever, and we have seen that dialogue with even the most recalcitrant governments is possible. Yet dialogue can work only if the United States abandons the hypocritical position of telling others what they must not do while keeping its own options open.
Universal ratification of the test ban treaty would be a step toward creating a truly global community of nations, in which all share the responsibility for humankind’s future.
Mikhail Gorbachev is the former president of the Soviet Union. Thomas L. Friedman and Maureen Dowd are off today.
28/12 The connection between bribery and property rights
The connection between bribery and property rights
By Zhao Kang
December 28, 2010
Transparency International has released its annual Global Corruption Barometer. Surprisingly, it shows that less than 10 percent of Chinese people paid a bribe in the last 12 months, ranking China among the less corrupt countries in the world.
Broadly, the chart shows that countries with a higher level of economic development have a lower level of corruption. Following this logic, since China is developing fast its ranking is about right. But many people are unconvinced. They think the ranking underestimates the level of corruption in China. And in fact, the key to understanding corruption is not to relate it to the level of economic output, but to the development and maturity of institutions.
The key to maximizing commercial efficiency lies in the transformation of institutions, according to the Nobel Prize winning economist Douglass North. The essential transformation from a traditional economy to a modern economy is the introduction of impersonal exchange – the basic principle of the market economy. In a market economy, by voting with our feet we realize the most effective and rational allocation of resources. But in today's China, too much power remains in the hands of high status individuals. If you want to get things done you have to deal with these individuals. And bribery is the inevitable result.
China is in a period of social transition from a pre-modern to a modern economy. But the government chose a gradualist path to economic reform that did not immediately get rid of personal factors in trade. This left space for rent-seeking and nepotism. As a result, ordinary people in China have become very familiar with the practice of bribery.
If we simply take the view that commercial efficiency is in inverse ratio to corruption, the way out might seem to be to develop the economy. And naturally our model of economic development is the developed countries. But history has proved that simply repeating the experience of developed countries is not only impossible, but may also have negative consequences. From the perspective of institutional economics, the way to curb bribery lies in developing institutional arrangements that underpin impersonal exchange.
These institutional arrangements are both political and economic. Constitutional government means reining in the power of officials and restricting political malpractice. In terms of the economy, the main thing is to clearly define property rights. For improvements in the political field, we must wait for future reforms. And improvements in defining property rights depend on all levels of society developing an understanding of these rights and their importance.
What is the relationship between property rights and bribery? According to Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, one of the main problems facing poor people is that they do not have clear title to their property. Their houses are built on land without clear ownership records, and their companies are not legally incorporated. The result is that, faced with complicated approvals needed to engage in trade, they must resort to bribery.
The point of defining property rights is not to exclude poor people – although this may be a dream of the rich. Rather, clearly delimiting property rights clears the path to the realization of the "open access social order" advocated by Douglass North that will draw more and more people into the global marketplace.
Examining the status quo in China reveals we have a long way to go. Let me cite an example from my personal investigations in Wenchuan following the devastating 2008 earthquake. The quake destroyed most of the buildings in the town. In the process of rebuilding, the first problem was to establish property rights. One problem that emerged was that many people who did not have official local residence permits and could not prove ownership of their homes, were not allocated houses despite having contributed to the construction of Wenchuan. Another problem was that, in allocating compensation, the government took no account of improvements made to the land by its owners. In interviews, villagers told me that when the land was originally distributed, most farmers chose cultivable land. No one took out contracts on the barren mountainside land. That was allocated to village officials who were not engaged in agricultural production. But when it came to paying compensation, the government allocated new land based on the original contracted acreage. The result was that peasants who had improved their land were inadequately compensated, while village officials, who had essentially done nothing, received more.
This net result was to undermine productive effort and to boost non-economic consumption. The compensation people received was just a matter of luck, unrelated to effort. Villagers told me that some people were allocated millions in compensation and blew it all on entertainment and gambling. They didn't use the money to invest, which would have improved economic output.
The reason for examining Wenchuan in discussing property rights is that the town was rebuilt from scratch and this represented an opportunity to break from the existing institutional structures and build a new and more flexible definition of property rights that would take into account the role of improvements made by landholders.
To build this more flexible definition of property rights will not be easy. It requires legal innovation and corresponding reforms in government institutions. But it is a precondition for realizing the impersonal exchange associated with a modern economy. Only when such institutions have been built, will we thoroughly eliminate bribery and corruption.
The author is a researcher with the Institute of Journalism and Communication of the China Academy of Social Sciences.
By Zhao Kang
December 28, 2010
Transparency International has released its annual Global Corruption Barometer. Surprisingly, it shows that less than 10 percent of Chinese people paid a bribe in the last 12 months, ranking China among the less corrupt countries in the world.
Broadly, the chart shows that countries with a higher level of economic development have a lower level of corruption. Following this logic, since China is developing fast its ranking is about right. But many people are unconvinced. They think the ranking underestimates the level of corruption in China. And in fact, the key to understanding corruption is not to relate it to the level of economic output, but to the development and maturity of institutions.
The key to maximizing commercial efficiency lies in the transformation of institutions, according to the Nobel Prize winning economist Douglass North. The essential transformation from a traditional economy to a modern economy is the introduction of impersonal exchange – the basic principle of the market economy. In a market economy, by voting with our feet we realize the most effective and rational allocation of resources. But in today's China, too much power remains in the hands of high status individuals. If you want to get things done you have to deal with these individuals. And bribery is the inevitable result.
China is in a period of social transition from a pre-modern to a modern economy. But the government chose a gradualist path to economic reform that did not immediately get rid of personal factors in trade. This left space for rent-seeking and nepotism. As a result, ordinary people in China have become very familiar with the practice of bribery.
If we simply take the view that commercial efficiency is in inverse ratio to corruption, the way out might seem to be to develop the economy. And naturally our model of economic development is the developed countries. But history has proved that simply repeating the experience of developed countries is not only impossible, but may also have negative consequences. From the perspective of institutional economics, the way to curb bribery lies in developing institutional arrangements that underpin impersonal exchange.
These institutional arrangements are both political and economic. Constitutional government means reining in the power of officials and restricting political malpractice. In terms of the economy, the main thing is to clearly define property rights. For improvements in the political field, we must wait for future reforms. And improvements in defining property rights depend on all levels of society developing an understanding of these rights and their importance.
What is the relationship between property rights and bribery? According to Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, one of the main problems facing poor people is that they do not have clear title to their property. Their houses are built on land without clear ownership records, and their companies are not legally incorporated. The result is that, faced with complicated approvals needed to engage in trade, they must resort to bribery.
The point of defining property rights is not to exclude poor people – although this may be a dream of the rich. Rather, clearly delimiting property rights clears the path to the realization of the "open access social order" advocated by Douglass North that will draw more and more people into the global marketplace.
Examining the status quo in China reveals we have a long way to go. Let me cite an example from my personal investigations in Wenchuan following the devastating 2008 earthquake. The quake destroyed most of the buildings in the town. In the process of rebuilding, the first problem was to establish property rights. One problem that emerged was that many people who did not have official local residence permits and could not prove ownership of their homes, were not allocated houses despite having contributed to the construction of Wenchuan. Another problem was that, in allocating compensation, the government took no account of improvements made to the land by its owners. In interviews, villagers told me that when the land was originally distributed, most farmers chose cultivable land. No one took out contracts on the barren mountainside land. That was allocated to village officials who were not engaged in agricultural production. But when it came to paying compensation, the government allocated new land based on the original contracted acreage. The result was that peasants who had improved their land were inadequately compensated, while village officials, who had essentially done nothing, received more.
This net result was to undermine productive effort and to boost non-economic consumption. The compensation people received was just a matter of luck, unrelated to effort. Villagers told me that some people were allocated millions in compensation and blew it all on entertainment and gambling. They didn't use the money to invest, which would have improved economic output.
The reason for examining Wenchuan in discussing property rights is that the town was rebuilt from scratch and this represented an opportunity to break from the existing institutional structures and build a new and more flexible definition of property rights that would take into account the role of improvements made by landholders.
To build this more flexible definition of property rights will not be easy. It requires legal innovation and corresponding reforms in government institutions. But it is a precondition for realizing the impersonal exchange associated with a modern economy. Only when such institutions have been built, will we thoroughly eliminate bribery and corruption.
The author is a researcher with the Institute of Journalism and Communication of the China Academy of Social Sciences.
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