Thursday 10 January 2013

How authoritarian rulers mess up with national economies and how that affects trade and development.



Over the past few decades, scholars seeking to examine the relationship between authoritarian governments and trade and development have increased relatively. Despite the ballooning of democratization, it is evident that authoritarian regimes in both emerging economies and the third world ones unlikely to become extinct in the near future. Courtesy of that assertion, it is therefore paramount to fully understand how these regimes affect trade and development of an economy. This term paper seeks to dissect authoritarian regimes to ascertain how their dictatorial leaders bring down national economies. In addition, the paper seeks to analyze the effects of such regimes on the trade and development of a nation.
According to Bingman (2006), authoritarian regimes are those governments whose rulers or decision makers cannot be expunged from power through a well-defined democratic process. Authoritarian rulers often mutilate the constitution of their countries to enable them exercise undue ruling over its subjects.  Authoritarian regimes can be divided into a number of groups’ i.e. Single party dictatorial regimes, monarchies and military juntas (Umpleby, Medvedeva, & Oyler, 2004).  A number of scholars assert that an institutionalized authoritarian government tends to adopt more progressive and open trade policies. This is often an antic employed by the primary decision makers in an authoritarian regime to enable them stay in power. The move to open up the economy to trade is often directed towards blinding a dissenting public. Institutionalized autocratic regimes often factor in the opinions of dissenting groups thereby increasing the numbers of those in the ruling system. The aforementioned move increases the number of individuals to be satisfied, it subsequently becomes relatively difficult to satisfy all political actors in the regime through trade contraction measures i.e. protectionist policies.  Instead, authoritarian leaders must embrace open trade, whose impacts can be fully felt by a wider section of the society.  However, that is relatively different in non-institutionalized regimes i.e. single party or dictatorial regimes where the interests and plight of the common citizens are considered less important.
Perception that leaders of emerging nations and those of third world countries ruling failed or almost failed economies is ripe. These perspectives grounded on authoritarian regimes assert that African leadership and that of Asian economies vary from criminalization to reelection of elites who are keen to manipulate power and utilize state resources to magnify their political and economic prowess. Despite enjoying the fruits of sovereignty i.e. internal and external sovereignty, internal sovereignty has taken a new twist as political leaders of the west inject funds to these economies to spur unrests through organized crimes for their personal benefits. The move by west political leaders to influence negatively the affairs of third world economies hampers trade and development of these economies. This is so because they play a major role in the formulation and subsequent implementation of retrogressive policies that discourage free engagement between states. Often, authoritarian rulers are driven by selfish interests and are keen to consolidate power by smashing their opponents and the support from political leaders of the west glues these interests together.  From the aforementioned it’s evident that authoritarian rulers mess up national economies courtesy of their selfish interests. In addition, adopted policies often retrogressive impede trade and development. This is because protectionist polies lock out free trade between economies.  Failure to adopt sound trade and development policies results into low growth and development rates. Given the insensitivity of authoritarian rulers and their governments it might be relatively hard for developing economies to realize millennium development goals by the year 2015 (Pike, Andres, & Tomaney, 2006).

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