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I am Mark Levin of the International Labour Office's Cooperative Branch,
based in Geneva, Switzerland. Thank you Ravi for kicking off the
discussion, which I think could be very interesting and important.
In a presentation to the October COG Conference in Washington DC, I
spoke about how the whole ownership issue is unfortunately not very high up the
international development agenda. I would hope that this
group could strategise about how this might be changed. My presentation is
called "Globalization, Decent Work and Ownership: The ILO Perspective" and can
be found at http://www.capitalownership.org/lib/LevinConferencePaperGlobalization.htm
I think that, in general, the role of cooperatives in poverty reduction is
fairly well-known, although often ignored by those development agencies with
biases against approaches based on mutual solidarity. These biases are
often based on poor experiences from the era of state interference in
cooperatives and need to be countered by current cooperative success
stories, of which there are many. The ILO will be publishing fairly
soon a working paper analysing the potential of cooperatives for poverty
reduction, which calls for a realistic assessment of what genuine
member-controlled, democratically-managed cooperatives can and cannot
do. As you may be aware, the ILO has a fairly substantial programme of
support to cooperative development but, like others engaged in this
field, we face an uphill struggle to obtain funds for our
activities.
I am concerned, howver, that there has not been much articulation
of how non-cooperative broadened ownership forms such as ESOPs might
play a role in poverty reduction in developing countries. Neither Ravi
Naidoo nor Juan Guillermo Espinosa's papers to the COG DC Conference were very
optimistic on this score. The current structure of employment and ownership in
developing countries was identified as a major constraint to the
development of ESOPs. Does this mean that ESOPs are (and will remain) a "rich
country phenomenon"? Are there good examples to contradict this view?
Anyway, these are some of my concerns. I look forward to the
discussion.
With best regards for a happy, healthy and peaceful 2003.
Mark Levin
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