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POLITICS: Rich Nations More Negative About Global Institutions

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 24 2006 (IPS) - Citizens of the world’s wealthiest countries are more negative about global institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and transnational corporations than their counterparts in the world’s poorer regions, according to a new poll of 32 nations released Tuesday by the BBC World Service.

The survey, which was conducted by the GlobeScan polling firm and the Washington-based Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), found that non-governmental organisations, such as environmental and human rights groups, are viewed most favourably by the survey’s nearly 38,000 respondents, of whom 60 percent described their influence as “mainly positive”.

Of seven global actors covered in the survey, the United Nations is viewed as the next most favourable – although, at a 59 percent “positive” rating, somewhat lower than it was a year ago.

Multinational companies, on the other hand, receive the lowest mark, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which are often accused of furthering the interests of multinational corporations in the developing world, are held in somewhat higher esteem.

The “news media” is also not faring too well in the eyes of public opinion, particularly in wealthy Anglophone nations covered in the survey – Australia, Canada, Britain, and the United States – and France, where majorities and pluralities of respondents rated its influence as more negative than positive.

The seventh “actor” rated in the survey, “world public opinion”, received only slightly better marks, dragged down by particularly low marks from U.S. respondents who were more negative about its influence than those from any other country. Like non-governmental organisations (NGOs), however, world public opinion was rated positively in every single country – in 15 countries by a majority and in the 17 others, by a plurality.

The survey, which was conducted during the last quarter of 2005, was released on the eve of this week’s World Economic Forum(WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, where the global corporate and policy-making elite gather to brainstorm about the leading trends of the day.

Its release also coincides with the sixth annual World Social Forum (WSF) in Venezuela, a similar gathering of representatives of global civil society and grassroots organisations that see themselves as a progressive alternative to the longer-running WEF.

A central focus of both forums is the impact of globalisation and global actors, particularly those covered by the new survey, on development and human welfare. Its findings, especially the relatively favourable assessments given to the World Bank and the IMF by respondents in poor countries, may surprise some WSF participants who have long argued that the impact of the two agencies’ policies in the Third World has been devastating to the poor.

Fifty-five percent of all respondents said the World Bank’s influence on the world was “mainly positive”, placing it only five percentage points behind NGOs (60 percent) and 14 percentage points ahead of the worst performer, global corporations (41 percent). Only 18 percent of respondents said the Bank’s influence was “mainly negative”.

Opinion of the IMF was somewhat more negative: 47 percent of respondents overall gave it a positive rating, while 21 percent said its influence was mainly negative.

But the negative assessments of both institutions were concentrated mainly among respondents in wealthy industrialised nations, particularly Britain, but also Canada, France, Australia, the U.S. and South Korea.

By contrast, respondents in some of the world’s poorest countries – some of which, such as Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Senegal and Indonesia, have had extended and difficult relations with the two agencies – gave them particularly high ratings: two out of three characterised the IMF’s influence and three of four characterised the Bank’s influence as “mainly positive”.

Among developing countries, the only exceptions to the strongly favourable views were three key middle-income countries: Argentina, Brazil, and Turkey. Strong majorities in Argentina and Brazil, which recently took the highly unusual step of paying off all outstanding loans to the IMF in advance in order to eliminate its influence over their macroeconomic policies, called the agency’s impact on the world “mainly negative”, while a large plurality of nearly half in Turkey agreed with that assessment.

Views of the Bank’s performance were better in all three countries, with pluralities in Brazil and Turkey assessing its influence as “mainly positive.” In Argentina, a strong plurality of 47 percent, however, chose “mainly negative”.

A similar breakdown among groups of countries was found in respondents’ attitudes toward global corporations. Led by Italy, Australia, Britain, Finland and France, the most negative ratings for multinational corporations came from western countries.

By contrast, the most favourable assessments were found in developing countries, particularly in Africa and Asia where majorities in South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Senegal all rated the companies’ impact as “mainly positive”.

Among developing countries, however, the most negative views were held by respondents in Argentina, Turkey, Mexico, where pluralities described the companies’ influence as “mainly negative”, and Iran.

NGOs, the survey’s star performer, were boosted, in particular, by overwhelmingly positive assessments in the western industrialised nations led by France (80 percent); Canada (78 percent); Spain (77 percent); Australia (74 percent); Poland and Italy (72 percent).

Among developing countries, large majorities of respondents in Brazil (75 percent); Argentina (74 percent); Indonesia and Iran (69 percent) and Kenya (67 percent) also rated the influence of NGOs as “mainly positive”. By contrast, only pluralities agreed with that assessment in four other countries – Mexico, India, Sri Lanka, and Saudi Arabia.

While the assessment of the U.N.’s performance rated just behind that of the NGOs, PIPA’s Director Steven Kull noted that its positive ratings had fallen by some 10 percentage points compared to a similar poll taken in late 2004.

The decline, he said, was not surprising given the problems the world body has encountered over the past year. “Given that (it) has been under the cloud of corruption investigations, has failed to achieve any significant breakthroughs in Iran or Darfur, and has been largely missing in action in Iraq, it is surprising that the U.N.’s rating has not slipped more,” he said.

Still, its overall rating was strongly positive; only 16 percent of respondents said its influence was “mainly negative.” Significantly, the only country where a plurality of respondents agreed was in Iraq (40 percent), although negative feelings were expressed by more than one in four respondents in Brazil and the U.S. (36 percent), France (33 percent); and Argentina (31 percent), as well. In Afghanistan, where the U.N. has played a major role, 79 percent of respondents expressed favourable views.

News media were viewed most positively in Indonesia (78 percent); Nigeria (75 percent) the Philippines (67 percent); Brazil (65 percent); Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Poland, and Senegal (63 percent), according to the survey.