Government Policy and Natural Resources

Protecting the environment - by those who do not think that doing so is important - is often depicted as a luxury that poor countries (and even wealthy ones) cannot afford. This is arguably not true: There are far greater costs in the long term for not protecting the environment than there are short-term costs in economic policies that destroy the world around us. However, each year economic and fiscal policies are put into place that exact significant environmental costs simply because they provide short-term gains - usually for a large corporation. This paper examines how a number of economic policies tend to encourage exploitation of increasingly diminishing natural resources. Many of these policies (indeed probably most) fall under the rubric of globalization.

As Kegley and Wittcoff (2000) note, the focus of the effects of globalization tends to shift with the speaker's or writer's own sphere of interest. Within the arena of economics, globalization tends to refer to two different types of activities. The first of these is the ever-increasing concentration of capital in financial markets that has come about through the increasing amalgamation of firms as they acquire divisions in a variety of countries. The second and related economic aspect of globalization is seen in the ever-increasing tendency of countries to affiliate themselves into multi-national economic blocs such as the European Community and the tri-country state defined by NAFTA.

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lationship of dependency is that the governments of poor countries are all too eager to compromise the safety and legal rights of workers who often are the first to suffer from the degraded environment that they are helping (albeit usually unwittingly and even unknowingly) to create, as Smith and Guarnizo (1998) argue. Equally of concern to those who oppose the process of globalization is the risk that many see to the environment that comes about both when manufacturing is exported to countries without strong environment protections and when companies have enough power even to influence First World governments. Large transnational corporations are responsible not only for the degraded condition of workers in developing conditions, but also for lax environmental policies that see destruction of the environment in poor countries (far away from where the boards of directors of these companies meet) as merely one of the costs of business-as-usual. Large companies push for the reduction of even the frail environmental protections offered up by most poorer nations (Smith and Guarnizo 19). When profits are elevated above all other goods, the environment suffers. And it is seemingly psychologically easier for corporate boards to consid

Category: Government - G