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Social Justice actually means a lot of things to different people. For me particularly,
since I have been working in the areas of finance, trade and development, I do see that
the area of Social Justice should be based upon our consideration of how we manage to
direct our development strategy in a way that we can have an all inclusive treatment of
people who can benefit from the kind of growth and job creation that we can use our macroeconomic
policies to generate. We need to look at social justice also from
the implications of the economic changes and crises to those who cannot protect themselves.
It’s not that we need to set up a full-fledged welfare system, but we need to have at least
a system that would help to give certain protection to families, to income earners that would
be able to protect themselves in a way that there would be an alternative to unemployment.
If they can seek self employment, seek re-training or to seek some opportunities to further their
education and at the same time we have to protect the family. If the income earner in
the family is impacted negatively because of the recessions, then we have to protect
the family, the wives, the women and the children. One of the largest productive capacity elements
is the women power, which has not really been used. As you know, in farming sector, half
of the work force in farming sector is women, so we need to be able to take care of women,
their rights, their sharing of benefits, their rights to equal pay and income, and all these
other things the way that women are treated according to the legal framework of the countries
should still be improved, and this is part of the Social Justice as we see it.
We believe therefore that economic growth can coexist with Social Justice, but it means
that there must be a role, an explicit developmental role of the governments, of the states in
this process. Policy coherence is one area in which we would
need certainly, because you need collectivity in the way we handle global issues these days.
You cannot handle global economic issues through trade alone, you need employment, you need
development. Trade is not for trade per se, trade is for development. And development
is not for trade. Trade should be for development. I would say that I tend to be on the optimistic
side, although I know from my experiences in economic fields that as the world becomes
more as one, as countries become richer, the real empirical life that we see is that there
is a strong tendency to less equality and more inequality. Even the Unites States, one
of the richest countries around the world, still maintains a very high level of inequality,
going by the Gini coefficient. So I would say that we have a good chance because at
the moment we have the kind of rational economic policies that people can understand. What
we can do to avoid conflicts, what we can do to avoid inflation, what we can to do to
avoid crisis, although we are not very good at implementing all these policies. We all
know about the kind of policies, so it’s a bit hard to have the political will to exercise
all these issues. I think we need strong political will.