Gambling Away Our Future with Decisions We’re Making Today

This Nicaraguan economist offers his reflections and his passionate concern about the government’s new IMF agreement, its treatment of the controversial domestic debt and the logic of next year’s budget— so like those of the previous neoliberal government.

Adolfo Acevedo

A little over a month ago macro-economy specialists were expressing their satisfaction in the media: we had finally come to an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and this was going to ensure us macroeconomic stability and a good investment climate and would put us on a sure road to the country’s development. President Ortega called getting the agreement a “feat.” He then presented the National Assembly with the 2008 budget bill, which is where we see the IMF logic reflected. It is quite similar to the logic of the Bolaños government: the same economic policy, the same fiscal policy, the same policy of prioritizing payment of the domestic debt, etc. Given all this I can’t pretend I’m not worried and anguished, both about the IMF agreement and about next year’s budget.

We’re not investing in education

What concerns me most is something that worried the now developed countries over a century ago. These countries developed because they resolved the problem of their population’s education in the 19th century by prioritizing basic, obligatory, free education for all. After that they continued investing more and more in people’s education. In Nicaragua, we’re in the 21st century and still don’t even have primary education for all. Mind you, it’s not that the now developed countries first grew economically and then invested in education. No, they grew because they invested in people’s education, in their human capital because a country has nothing more valuable than its people. We’re heading in the other direction, gambling away our future with the decisions we’re making today. We can’t keep on this way.

I want to demonstrate this based on the proven certainty that the schooling a person receives largely determines his or her future. Let’s look at the numbers. The Nicaraguans who were 19 years and under in 1990, in other words of school age, represented 63% of the working-age population 15 years later, in 2005. In those 15 years, the country didn’t invest what it should have in education for all those people because, following the logic of all IMF programs, the government used 51% of its fiscal income to service the public debt. Thanks to that priority, the majority of the young population entered the labor market with very low education levels: in the rural zones that meant two, three or at most four years of primary school and in the urban zones six years tops. Yet even to work in the free trade zone sweat shops requires at least completing primary school. Its low academic level means that the majority of that population is condemned to find only precarious or informal occupations for the next 50 years of their life, which will keep them always at the threshold of poverty.

Let’s now look at what could happen in the next 15 years, from 2005 to 2020. Nicaraguans who were 19 years old or younger in 2005 will represent 55% of the country’s entire labor force in 2020. And as the priorities haven’t changed, we’re also condemning that new generation to such low academic levels that they will repeat the cycle of precarious jobs and lifelong poverty.

Many obstacles to correcting that situation

These figures are alarming. Only 35% of preschool-age Nicaraguan children are in school, even though we now know that the stimulation of preschool education is crucial to the development of a child’s capacities. The figure is better for primary school, with 87% of the children of that age level enrolled. The bad news is that they don’t necessary complete primary school. Only 60% of those who enroll in primary school finish, a figure below that of the lowest-income countries on the planet; essentially the children of poor families get lost along the way. The government says it will meet the Millennium Development Goals because it has set the target of achieving 100% primary school enrollment for 2010, which Guatemala—which also has a very low educational level—hit in 2004. One of several problems with the government’s claim is that the Millennium Development Goal at the primary school level isn’t that 100% of the children enroll, but that they all complete that cycle.

Another problem is that the UN’s Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC() estimates that a person needs at least 12 years of schooling, in other words, a full high school education, to have an 80% probability of not spending the rest of his or her life in poverty. That’s why ECLAC and UNESCO are proposing that the Millennium Goals include a target related to secondary school as well. And what’s happening in Nicaragua regarding high school? Only four of every ten children enroll, and only 40% of those graduate.

A third problem is that the Education Ministry has made a series of estimates of how much it would cost to bring the preschool enrollment up to 55%, primary school enrollment and completion up to 100% and high school enrollment up to 60% by 2015—the year the world’s countries pledged to have met the Millennium Goals. Bolivia, which is as poor as Nicaragua, already has 100% primary school enrollment and completion and an average education level of nine years rather than the five we have today. The ministry’s calculation was that attaining these levels would require bringing its budget up to 6% of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2010, doubling to $400 million the $200 million currently earmarked for education. That’s the effort the country must make to avoid condemning the majority of this generation’s children to the same life of poverty as the previous generation. That’s the future we’re playing with today, and it goes without saying that it’s only going to be resolved little by little.

On top of poor coverage,
we have poor quality education

And teachers’ salaries? Providing a better salary isn’t important only for the recognition of their professional dignity, but for another important reason as well. The salary of Nicaragua’s teachers is half the average salary earned by the rest of the country’s workers. In other words, a skilled person could on average double his or her salary working in any other profession than teaching. This means we’ll never attract the most qualified people to the teaching profession, and will always have teachers with low skills. And of course that means our children’s education will also be low quality, which is almost like not receiving it at all.

Seven of every ten jobs in Nicaragua are precarious and informal, which is only logical: the Nicaraguan economy is creating the type of employment that can absorb the low-skill Nicaraguan labor force. Politicians frequently say they’re going to create quality jobs and of course the population’s main demand is well-remunerated work. But quality jobs and good pay require skills.

Everywhere in the world there is a correlation between the level of schooling that people reach and the income level they will have over their lifetime. If they only went to primary school they’ll have low income. If they got as far as high school they can buy the market basket with their salary. If they study more, their income will increase further. That’s why parents want their children to go to university. If only families of upper income Nicaraguan families finish high school, go to collage and get a master’s degree, even more income will be concentrated among the few who can get this higher education. And not only that: our population’s average education will keep Nicaragua from being competitive in this global economy, which thinks nothing of leaving out in the cold individuals and whole countries that haven’t developed a minimum capacity to assimilate knowledge and technology. Is that the future we want for our country? And I say we because politicians aren’t the only ones at fault. What about us? What did we do, each one of us? We’re talking about the destiny of the country we say we love, the destiny of the children and young people we refer to as the country’s future.

The IMF isn’t interested in education

Neither the program with the IMF nor the 2008 budget takes any of this into account. The IMF doesn’t want Nicaragua to hire thousands more teachers and seriously adjust their salaries, bringing them up to at least the average salary of other workers if it is to meet the Millennium Development Goals on education. The only thing it cares about is that the salary mass, obtained by multiplying the number of public workers by their average salary, remains frozen at a fixed percentage of the GDP. This means that if the nominal GDP grows 12%, the salary of state workers can’t grow more than that.

And why is the IMF specifically worried about a salary rise for teachers? Its answer is that if their salaries rise, it will have a “demonstration effect” on other workers, creating struggles for better salaries in other sectors, with a consequent rise in the cost of Nicaragua’s labor force, causing it to lose its main attraction to foreign investors. Our main competitive advantage, as we all know, is having a rock-bottom-cheap labor force. The IMF believes we should specialize in being poor, maintaining a labor force so cheap it can even compete with China’s, which is around 8% cheaper than ours.

Why do we need an agreement with the IMF?

No matter how much they try to tell us otherwise, macroeconomic stability has nothing to do with an agreement with the IMF. What does failing to invest in education have to do with macroeconomic stability? Macroeconomic stability basically means that government spending can’t be financed by printing money not backed by income and that the government must not indebt itself beyond its possibility to pay. But doing either of those things is prohibited by law. So why do we need a program with the IMF? The answer is that it’s to ensure not macroeconomic stability, but rather the predominance of determined national and international interests.

The economists that pontificate in the name of the Monetary Fund should read a Nobel Prize winner in Economy like Joseph Stiglitz, chief economic adviser to President Clinton and chief economist and vice president of the World Bank until he was forced out of that position after publicly opposing the IMF and US Treasury Department prescriptions during the Asian crisis. From those posts, Stiglitz realized how these institutions serve the interests of the business finance community and how the IMF prescriptions have very little to do with conclusions growing out of the analysis of economic science. They are not technical prescriptions, but rather ideological ones that tend to privilege the interests of finance capital.

This year we could have called the shots

Why did we have to negotiate an agreement with the IMF? A series of fortunate circumstances this year combined to permit Nicaragua to present its own program and negotiate it in a sovereign manner for the first time. Or even not to negotiate anything. But it didn’t happen. The government was desperate to negotiate, negotiated it all in secret and only published the program it presented to the IMF after everything was agreed to and nothing more could be done. It is hard to understand the political logic behind that behavior.

The first fortunate circumstance is the crisis the IMF is currently suffering. We’re told that an agreement was “inevitable,” that “nothing” could be done… But that’s not true. The IMF is right now a shadow of its former self, with no trace of the power it had only two years ago. It can no longer impose anything on countries, with the possible exception of the poorest African ones, but it doesn’t have the power to impose anything on Nicaragua.

How did the IMF get so weakened?

The IMF has an enormous bureaucracy and exaggerated salaries—$13,000 a month, for example. Its budget is nearly the size of Nicaragua’s. How does the IMF cover that budget? For many years it provided sizable loans to large middle-income countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and several Asian countries. The interest payments those countries made to the IMF every year were its main source of income for financing its budget. The relationship with those countries gave the IMF huge power, allowing it to impose conditions on Brazil, one of the largest developing countries in the world, on Argentina, Indonesia, Turkey, etc.

But in December 2005 Argentina did an extremely important thing. That country, which the IMF presented as a model, had fallen into a brutal economic crisis in 2001, for which the IMF prescribed policies that only worsened it. But when Kirchner came to office, he decided to apply economic recovery policies opposed to the IMF’s recommendations. He also applied a sovereign restructuring of the foreign debt with powerful creditors, with no intervention by the IMF. The holders of Argentina’s debt portfolio were told that the government was going to change the debt securities for others that would be paid over a far longer period at a much lower interest rate. The government gave the creditors two voluntary options: accept these new securities in exchange for those they held, or not accept them and be paid nothing on the existing ones. There were already precedents for this type of restructuring in South Korea, which did exactly the same thing with its foreign creditors. By so doing, Argentina reduced what is called the “net present value” of its debt by no less than 80%. And what did the IMF do then? Instead of supporting Argentina’s efforts to recover, it assumed a destructive attitude toward the new government. Nonetheless, the Argentine economy recovered very quickyl and since then has been growing at an average annual rate of between 8% and 9%. And the country didn’t lose either credibility or investors, as we are often told would happen in Nicaragua if we took a sovereign stance toward the IMF.

Stiglitz says that when a country restructures its debt, investor confidence in it increases. No one loans money to a heavily indebted person, but if that person manages to shed some of the burden of that debt, they view it with more confidence. When the enormous debt burden of a country is lifted through restructuring, its economic prospect improves; economists say that the expected profitability of all investments increases. And if the anticipated profitability increases, why wouldn’t investors come to invest? That’s what happened in Argentina after the restructuring: the economic prospect improved greatly. Naturally investors flocked to Argentina, as they did to South Korea, Russia and all the other countries that have restructured their debts.

So what they say would happen in Nicaragua is just to intimidate us. The IMF constantly tells us we have no other option than to do what it tells us. So we do, even though the country is destroying its future. Our young people are smart enough to feel it, to see that this country has no future, so they want to go to other countries. And many do. With the emigration of the best of our youth, we’re being left with no future in the midst of utter passivity.

Let’s get back to the IMF’s story. Once it recovered, Argentina dealt the IMF a master stroke, with support from Venezuela, I might add. At the end of 1995 it paid off its entire debt to the IMF. Brazil followed suit. Then other middle-income debtors began to do the same; they paid their debts to the IMF outright. In so doing, they undercut its main source of income, which were the interest payments on those loans. The IMF’s new general director is now announcing that he’s going to have to reduce the size of the institution because it has a lot of “fat” and needs to cut its spending.

What will the IMF do now?

All this happened last year. Now what will the IMF do? Where will it get its clout, by negotiating with some poor African country and imposing conditions on it? Its power was its ability to negotiate with Brazil, Argentina, Poland and the like, but by losing those main large clients, the only ones that generated income to cover its own budget, it has entered into a financial crisis and lost influence.

Only 24 of all the countries in the world have programs with the IMF now. And although the IMF maintains a Western Hemisphere department with an enormous apparatus, only six Latin American countries have programs with it: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Peru, the latter because Alan García negotiated one to clean up his image, as he had been accused of being a populist during his first mandate. After the Asian countries’ financial crisis and the policies imposed by the IMF to pull out of it, those countries wanted no more to do with it. They began to accumulate international reserves and now have half the world’s international reserves. Brazil and Argentina also have an enormous amount of reserves, and let’s not even talk about Venezuela. Why do any of these countries want the Fund anymore? This new situation also allows Venezuela to step in as an alternative financing source.

When Argentina paid its debt all at once, the IMF received a huge amount of money, but it couldn’t loan it out to the big medium-income countries anymore, because they wanted no part of it. Now it has turned into a financial speculator. It is investing that money in the financial markets to obtain earnings and keep itself afloat. The countries that belong to the IMF make contributions to cover the cost of the loans it makes to us, which are concessionary with subsidized interest rates, although the IMF says these contributions no longer cover all the costs. There are also critiques of the IMF’s involvement with the poorest countries. There is now a general consensus that the IMF knows nothing about reducing poverty, a view the IMF itself even admits to sharing. Because it is also accused by some of knowing nothing about development policies either, there are those who argue that it should get out of the business of providing concessionary loans to the poorest countries.

We went to Washington to meet with the IMF in 2004 and at that time we encountered a haughty bullying attitude, all inspired by the institution’s sense of power. When we went back to meet with the IMF director in February of this year, we found humility among the people we met, all of whom recognized that they had been mistaken and were prepared to mend their ways. They know they’ve lost power.

All this makes the Nicaraguan government’s actions even more serious, because it sought out the IMF to sign an agreement for the next three years in the midst of this crisis. Daniel Ortega had barely won the elections when his economic team proposed negotiating a program with the IMF and they all became desperate to get it approved. We in the Civil Coordinator let them know that there were fundamental issues we needed to debate to achieve a consensus before negotiating with the IMF, such as education, health, teachers’ salaries, housing, rural roads, drinking water, sanitation… But since they think they own the absolute truth, why should they listen to us?

Not even the Budget Support Group
requires Nicaragua to have an IMF program

The other fortunate circumstance that could have avoided what we have today is that the Budget Support Group, made up of countries in the North that provide 7% of Nicaragua’s annual budget, has stopped linking its disbursements to Nicaragua having a program with the IMF, as it has required for some years now. Even before the Ortega government sought out the IMF we knew that some individual countries within the Budget Support Group didn’t require a program with the IMF. That alone gave the government much more freedom and capacity to negotiate, but it didn’t take that favorable circumstance into account either. Now the conclusions of the government’s latest meeting with this group appear in the Treasury Ministry’s web page, where you can read that the group as a whole reaffirms that its disbursements aren’t linked to a program with the IMF.

The government told us that it offered the IMF a “sovereign” program. And effectively, the government did present its own program, drafted by its economic team. That’s why the President told us, “The Monetary Fund isn’t imposing anything on us,” and it’s true. The government itself proposed all the commitments assumed with the Fund: the increase in electricity rates, the freezing of public sector workers’ salaries as a percentage of the GDP, the absolute priority on payment of the public debt… You can read that program on line, and now in Spanish, unlike the similar program that Bolaños signed with the IMF nearly four years ago, which was first drafted in English, presumably in Washington.

The government insisted
on paying the domestic debt

Putting a priority on payment of the public debt was the government’s own proposal, because the first thing it did was adopt the IMF’s “debt sustainability” focus. But there are lots of ways to understand debt sustainability. For example, former UN Secretary General Koffi Annan declared that a debt is “sustainable” when it can be paid without reducing investment in health and education. First you cover all the social needs and then you dedicate the rest to paying the debt. That is a “sustainable” debt.

The Fund’s approach is the exact opposite, and the Nicaraguan government embraced that approach as its own. That’s why the resources aren’t assured to bring the education budget up 6% of the GDP to avoid condemning another generation to a lack of schooling and to precarious jobs and poverty. It’s also why the program’s mid-range budget projections—made because it’s a three year-program—show the Education Ministry’s budget only rising from 3.7% of the GDP in 2008 to 3.9% in 2010. In other words, it isn’t going to reach the 6% that the ministry said would be necessary to achieve levels Bolivia and Guatemala already have. With this approach, what can the ministers do, even if they have the greatest desire? The health minister is delightful and dedicated, but what is she going to buy medicines with? The medications budget for 2008 is exactly the same as it was in 2007, despite the population growth and the Hurricane Felix emergency.

The main problem with the 2008 budget is that it has the same logic as the budgets of the past five years. First, there’s the public debt’s oversized service payment and the transfers to the Central Bank to accumulate reserves. Just short of $300 million was earmarked to service the domestic debt while only $6 million was allocated to deal with the emergency in the Caribbean due to the passage of Hurricane Felix and a mere $2 million to capitalize the famous new Development bank, which I don’t think is even enough to cover the payroll of its officials. Any micro-financing agency lends much more than that. Then there’s $15 million for the famous Zero Hunger Program, which is supposed to do away with hunger in Nicaragua, and $5 million for the Zero Usury Program.

A proposed payment moratorium
on part of the domestic debt

The policy of paying the debt generated by the bank bailout bonds known as CENIs and the reason given for it have been exactly the same as President Bolaños used: we have to pay them because the country will lose credibility if we don’t. Then on October 30, after budgeting $48.3 million for 2008 specifically to service the debt derived from the illegal issuing of the CENIs—which were later replaced, also illegally, by what are called bank bonds—President Ortega proposed responding to the emergency caused by Hurricane Felix and the deluge with a two-year moratorium on interest payments for those bonds. Only two days before that, he had said this debt was sacred. Who knows what changed for him to propose the moratorium.

What can I say about the moratorium proposal? According to United Nations estimates, dealing with the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Felix and the rains in the Pacific will require nearly US$400 million, almost a third of the total national budget for 2008. Given that, the moratorium is magnificent, urgent, the first appropriate national response to such a grave national crisis. I say first because almost two months after the passage of Felix, no decision had been adopted to ensure the basic resources needed to get a grip on at least the most pressing aspects of this crisis, so it was about time for something significant to be done.

Responding to the victims of the disasters has to be a fundamental budget priority. Yet the moratorium can only be the first stop on a rapid move toward totally restructuring that debt, including payment on both the CENI bonds and the BPI bonds, issued earlier as compensation to people whose property was unjustly confiscated in the eighties.

That restructuring has to extend the payment deadlines to 30 years and reduce the interest rates by half. In 2002-2004, we in the Civil Coordinator emphasized restructuring only the debt from the CENIs, because they represented the greatest debt burden on the budget. But now the BPIs have overtaken the CENIs.

Without an in-depth restructuring of the entire domestic debt, Nicaragua will never have the resources to increase investments in health and education to the necessary levels, deal with the enormous housing deficit, adequately capitalize the Development Bank or even ensure the annual main-tenance of access roads.

The formula for restructuring
the domestic debt is simple

When announcing the moratorium, the President made clear that there’s no “magic formula” to deal with the domestic debt. There may be no magic, but there is a simple formula. The public institutions under the executive’s control or influence have to fulfill their responsibility, reviewing all issues related to the legality and illegality of that debt once and for all to determine which part of it is the result of fraudulent operations as a consequence of the association of public officials and debt holders and should thus not be recognized. Then they should restructure the remaining balance that hasn’t already been cancelled using the formula of a trade of securities to at least 30 years repayment with a drastic reduction in the interest rates. Under these conditions, the government would be in a different negotiating position than if it agrees to embark on what the creditors have requested: to “refinance” the debt as if the whole thing were legitimate.

No other government has had so many instruments in its favor to definitively and intensively resolve the problem of the enormous hemorrhaging of treasury resources to pay the domestic debt. This government directly controls the Attorney General’s Office, Customs, the Internal Revenue Service and has powerful influence over the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, the Comptroller General’s Office and the unions and guilds. It’s enough to know a little about the attributions and powers of these institutions and the mobilizing capacity of the unions to know that the government has at its disposal an impressive battery of resources to resolve this issue in strict accordance with the law. If it were to do this, it would enjoy the energetic backing of all society.

The Esso case is paradigmatic. The government mobilized all available instruments to bring to its knees a powerful transnational company that was accustomed to having the backing of its own powerful government. In that case, there were allegations that some “legal slippage” of procedures had occurred, but all in the greater national interest. In the case of this debt, where the greater national interest is much clearer and more evident, why is the government only using a moratorium? Because the debt is sacred and can’t be touched without having to face off with global capitalism and risk everything collapsing? A face-off with global capitalism seems much more probable to me for intervening Esso’s gas tanks under the argument that it owed customs duty—which it doesn’t have to pay—than providing a legally-based solution to a debt that isn’t sacred in any way, least of all its origins. I’m convinced that in this case the problem isn’t global capitalism, but rather the tight alliance the government has been weaving with the exponents of big national capital, particularly banking capital.

Which side of its mouth
will the government speak out of?

What will the government decide? Will it fully restructure the debt or just refinance it, thus benefiting the bankers? It’s hard to understand this government’s economic logic. And it’s not that its technical team isn’t skilled. They have the same education as the IMF officials and may even have studied in the same universities, because they all seem to have the same approach; their hard drive is similarly formatted. Furthermore, the problem doesn’t stop with the government’s technical team, but extends to those in charge of the political direction. Why did the government go out so desperately in search of a program with the IMF? For the same reason, in my view, that it is privileging relations with big national private capital. It’s a political reason: it needs a sort of political endorsement to clean up its image. It needs to project a different image than its old one without losing its old supporters. That’s why it issues extremely radical rhetoric out of one side of its mouth and out of the other agrees with the IMF and with big private business in the constant meetings they hold. The IMF representative said that Nicaraguan business leaders have now learned to ignore the President’s rhetoric and focus on the real policies: the program with the IMF assures them the conditions they need and they hold ongoing meetings with the President, who tells them he’s going to honor what they decide.

Why the rhetoric? Daniel Ortega needs to buttress the view in the FSLN base that he’s a revolutionary and for the same reason he needs a discourse to export to Venezuela. But he also needs a strong alliance with big national capital, and that means giving it guarantees. And it’s working. The businesspeople have now begun to say that Ortega is more like Lula than like Chávez.

We can’t leave politics to the politicians

Nicaragua’s destiny is at stake today, because instead of concentrating on people’s education, a few are negotiating constitutional reforms to ensure their perpetuity in power. And what about us? Are we going to leave the country’s future to today’s political system? The Civil Coordinator’s actions are aimed at teaching the citizens that we have the right and the responsibility to involve ourselves in public affairs, because these affairs are too important to leave in the hands of politicians. Getting involved means seeking information, interpreting it, taking a position, criticizing, proposing and intervening in the decision-making process. They tell us the issues are too technical, too complex, but they’re really not. They’re simple. And they’re important because the future of the country and of all of us is at stake in them. So we either accept our responsibility to get involved or may the best man win.

My hope with this government was that it would summon the citizenry and tell them that we’re going to resolve the education problem, that we’re going to have additional resources from Venezuela and are going to incorporate them into the budget to prioritize education and resolve the problem of housing and drinking water, and are going to restructure the domestic debt and institute a tax reform that ensures that those who concentrate the income pay their fair share of taxes.

Eliminating exemptions and exonerations isn’t enough to do this tax reform effectively; nowhere in the world does that ensure a progressive tax system. It is only ensured when those who have more and earn more pay more. In the United States, the families that concentrate the top 10% of the national income pay 30% of their personal income in income taxes. The ambassador of Sweden, Eva Zetterberg, told us that she pays half her salary in taxes. The developed countries maintain a social spending level that is double that of the Latin American countries as a percentage of the GDP by having a tax burden that is twice what ours is and ensuring that it doesn’t fall so heavily on the lower income population, as in our countries, but rather falls proportionately more on the upper income sectors. That’s why they have resources. Our tax burden falls disproportionately on the lower income sectors, which is why tax collection is low and we have no resources. And to top it all off, we pay the debt to the wealthiest with taxes paid mainly by the poor. The budget thus becomes a mechanism to make the rich even richer. That’s also the logic of the 2008 budget, the one design by the FSLN government. So, arise ye wretched of the earth!

Adolfo Acevedo works with the Civil Coordinator, a grouping of civil society organizations.

Print text

Send text