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1st Antalya Forum –  International Conference

‘Rethinking of the Global Economic Order’

(Antalya- Rixos Tekirova, 30th Nvember, 2012)

AN EVALUATION PAPER

Number of participants: 400 / from 20 countries

Speakers:

1st Session

• Prof.Dr.Kamran Mofid, UK
• Prof.Dr.Fred Dallmayr, USA
• Prof.Dr.İbrahim Öztürk, Turkey
• Prof.Dr.Yin Jianfeng, China

2nd Session

• Ali Bulaç, Turkey
• Prof.Dr.Vladimir Kvint, USA
• Prof.Dr.Shahid Ahmed, India
• Dr.Heinrich Bonnenberg, Germany

  3rd Session

• Prof.Dr.Jack A. Goldstone, USA
• Rajesh Makwana, UK
• Prof.Dr.Valery Heyets, Ukraine
• Prof.Dr.Saltanat Ahmetzhanova, Kazakhstan

 4th Session

• Prof.Dr. Hans Köechler, Austria
• Prof.Dr.Steven Paul Francis Szeghi, USA
• Prof.Dr.Hooshmand Badee, UK
• Prof.Dr.Shahlar Asghеrov, Azerbaijan

 * * *

We gathered here, at Antalya, one of the shining tourism and culture destinations of ancient as well as the modern world. Antalya is also people engaged in fruitful dialogue and living together peacefully. We are grateful for the warm hospitality and support, which we have received from the organizers of Antalya Forum. We come together from many countries, cultures, civilizations, faiths, and different areas of expertise to continue our exploration of pathways to Globalization for the Common Good.

The world is engulfed by a multitude of crises, including enduring poverty for many; coupled with hunger, resource depletion, a lack of development and growth, economic and social injustice, climate change, species extinction, war, and violence. It is in dialogue with one another respecting alternative cultures, different religions and diverse social norms, nationalities, and ethnicities, as well as different mode of economic systems that we will find the global solutions needed for our planet, our human family, and the larger community of the natural world to which we belong.

The raison d’être of Antalya Forum and this first international conference on the global economic system is to promote peaceful and sustainable economic development, global interconnectedness, reverence for life, unity of peoples, and balance with nature.

• To start with, we need to analyze not the persons, industrial actors and even industrial policies but the philosophy and the ideology that lies beneath the system itself that led to the 2009 crisis.
• The quality of economic behaviors are determined by many factors such as the core values of the surrounding overall economic system, the entrepreneur’s personal and environmental characteristics, the nature of the micro business environment, the entrepreneur’s personal set of goals and the existence of a viable business idea.
• Mainstream economic thinking purposefully excluded institutional, cultural, and psychological factors in economic behavior and decision-making processes. Therefore, the role ofethical, religious, spiritual values was left aside as that role is not directly observable and cannot be easily quantified within abstract and simple neoclassical economic models.
• The deepest reason for the exclusion of these values is that such values are found to be a constraint in the quest for profit. Therefore, by eliminating such constraints on the hedonistic desires that trigger conspicuous consumption, the path for unrestrained profit maximization was established. As of today, the world is approaching a catastrophe.
• Modern technology and industrialization have brought about a virtually borderless world of economic interaction, a process that has increasingly nourished an illusion of omnipotence, making man believe that he can become the sole master of his destiny, individually as well as collectively.

The harsh awakening in the course of today’s financial and economic crisis – at the domestic, regional and global levels – has made people aware of the limits and contradictions inherent in unrestrained pursuit of economic interests. This experience may prepare them to ask the fundamental question as to the incompleteness of an exclusively economic, and for that matter secular, approach. In other words, the modern idea of “progress” is based on an artificial and arbitrary exclusion (indeed rejection) of man’s transcendent dimension, and a profound forgetfulness of the finiteness of human capabilities and material resources. The quasi-religious belief in the perpetual progress of the economy, coupled with a linear understanding of time – the “secular eschatology of growth,” has created a false and misleading sense of security, which does not stand the test of time.

• Markets and democracy are not necessarily compatible and may even clash. As defined by neo-liberalism, market economics coincides with laissez-faire capitalism, which concentrates exclusively on private (individual or corporate) profit. Since financial profit tends to go to a small elite, this form of capitalism clashes with the democratic demand for equality and equal liberty of all citizens.  Hence, markets need to be democratically regulated in both the domestic and international arenas.
  • Current globalization is moving towards a no man’s land, in the sense that in the rush to eliminate tariffs and other trade barriers, the global economic system that exists today has set up a race to the bottom where societies and governments compete with each other to lower taxes and eliminate regulations that protect consumers, workers, and the environment.
  • Karl Polanyi has shown in his Great Transformation, 1944, the market is a social institution and developed by concrete, deliberate and coordinated public intervention. Therefore, markets develop throughout time in an evolutionary manner. Time as it relates to economic and societal change is the dimension in which the learning process of human beings shapes the way institutions evolves. Based upon this nature of market, we need to re-institutionalize deeper values into our current system.

Institutions establish the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction. As viewed from this perspective, delinking formal as well as informal institutional constraints on economic activities, activates the capitalist mode of accumulation. Within this framework, “the beliefs that individuals, groups, and societies hold which determine choices are a consequence of learning through time — not just the span of an individual’s life or of a generation of a society but the learning embodied in individuals, groups, and societies that is cumulative through time and passed on inter generationally by the culture of a society. In that regard the role of institutions is that as they are guide to the human interaction. They consequently structure everyday life and are capable of reducing uncertainty. By facilitating exchange, they also reduce transaction costs and increase potential gains from trade. In the final analysis, they positively contribute to the economic performance and increase the well being of the country. In order to create a sustainable future and a human economy, all of these:

• Code of conduct,
• Pattern of individual as well as
• Corporate behavior should be restructured with a different payoff matrix.

At the level of empirical evidences, Adelman and Morris (1999) have shown the role institutions played in successful growth and development in the 19th century experience. They found that institutions determine the nature of market, property rights, the nature of land tenure and distribution, distribution of assets, human resource development, and the size and the structure of transportation investment, and crucial relative prices affecting the speed of agricultural and industrial change.

In historical processes, issues such as corporation law and capital accumulation were approached with different views in specific societies, which consequently resulted in dissimilar economic structures and levels of development. In that regard, the role of property rights, the nature of incentive schemes, decision-making structures, and information and coordination mechanisms should be designed so that the relationship between the system, entrepreneurship and morality can be more aptly defined. As an alternative to the current system, therefore, re-institutionalization of a new incentive system around a new payoff matrix for our daily economic behaviors is essential. This is because institutions form the incentive structure of a society, including political and economic entities. In this regard, economic performance reflects the nature and the quality of the institutional framework that economic agents operate in.

While private material incentives reward proper economic behavior with a greater share of national output, moral incentives promote man’s sense of altruism and his concern for responsibility toward the general or social good. The use of moral incentives assumes that social recognition and approbation are just as important as the provision of material goods in motivating proper economic performance.

We want to emphasis on the metaphysical and moral dimensions of ethical and/or religious as a corrective to this approach. While “globalism” essentially means a self-enclosed economic and technological world – but one without political, legal or moral boundaries or limits — it is religion that locates the human being in a metaphysically open context which goes beyond the confines of the homo faber. This requires a common understanding of humanity insofar as it is rooted in an absolute realm that transcends all finite economic prospects, irrespective of their geographical or temporal scope.

As long as moral capacity and creativity is motivated by introducing a correct institutional framework, operation and performance of the free market system will also be enhanced, and this will bring further material benefit to the society in terms of an increased spectrum of choice, employment and quality of goods and services. What we are trying to do here is to prevent the entrepreneur from causing harm to the free market system as well as to the society in general and therefore facilitating the grounds for sustainable development while maximizing material wellbeing.

To sum up, in order to carry out economic activities with a desirable level of effectiveness, each system makes its own assumptions about human behavior and accordingly establishes its own institutional and organizational mechanisms so that:

(i)              They can organize the process of decision-makingarrangements employed by     economic agents, including the government.

(ii)            They can devise a mechanism that provides information and coordinates decisions made by consumers, producers and the government as to consumption, production and the use of inputs, so that the production and consumption of the proper basket of goods and services are guaranteed.

(iii)          They should be capable of enforcing property rights for a broad cross-section of society, so that a variety of individuals have incentives to invest and take part in economic life.

(iv)          They can provide the material or moral incentives to regulate the activities of economic agents.

(v)            They should be able to constrain the actions of elites, politicians and other powerful interest groups, so that these people cannot expropriate the incomes and investments of others or create a highly uneven playing field.

(vi)          They should provide some degree of equal opportunity for broad segments of society, so that individuals can make investments, especially in human capital, and participate in productive economic activities.

• New global institutions and structures and trade rules are required so that public treasuries are not depleted, and that the rights of consumers, workers, and nature are not eroded more so, and are once again given the respect and consideration they deserve.  Sweeping changes are needed in short so that human society and human community and the web of life might continue to exist and flourish. We need to find a better way, a better way of organizing and structuring the global economy, in order to make this world, this earth that we all must share, which we all need, a better place for all.
• Our social and economic structures are constantly changing; and no single economic theory is always going to be suitable for the whole world. A mature humanity is capable of developing an economy with a totally new logic that promotes justice and safeguards the interest of all. 
• Peace and true globalization are closely interconnected. The astounding progress that has taken place in the fields of communication, transportation, and information technology has provided many opportunities to increase the chances of achieving peace and most importantly the conscience that exist and is universally high. The economic consequences of peace are incredible. Peace brings about a whole new relationship between the humankind who then can become totally creative and innovative. The economic challenge to early humanity was the survival of the family; the challenge today is how to shape the future global economy so that the benefits of globalization will be distributed fairly and justly among the citizens of the world. 
• We must strengthen the influence of the majority of humans that wish to live in peace. We strongly endorse efforts to combine our collective intelligence to build globalization from the bottom-up: creating a global consensus of commitment to the common good. We urge the development of consensus for a common global action plan, beginning with a multi-stakeholder consultation process, and culminating in a common vision for ending poverty, reversing climate change, financing sustainable development and creating structural reforms in global trade, finance, and energy policy.
• The basic structure of the global economy penalizes nations, firms, and individuals who respect the rights of workers and the rights of the environment. Such nations, firms, and individuals are placed at a competitive disadvantage. 
• Humanity is facing what can only be described as a global emergency. Extreme poverty and deprivation, policies of economic austerity and the impacts of climate change and other natural disasters are taking the lives of over 40,000 people every single day and severely affecting many millions of others. Dealing with the structural causes of this emergency will require transformative reforms on a scale never before attempted. However, in the simplest terms this emergency exists largely because governments have pursued policies that undermine the ‘sharing economy’ – systems of social protection that humanity has progressively established to protect the poor and vulnerable. As an immediate response to this global emergency, sharing the world’s vast financial resources more equitably can help to prevent needless suffering and death and pave the way for more substantial reforms in the near future. As detailed in the report ‘Financing the global sharing economy’ we already have the money, the institutions and the expertise in place to take this crucial first step towards world rehabilitation. However, what still lacks is a sufficient level of public support across the world to overcome the political and commercial barriers to implementing the necessary critical measures. Mobilizing world public opinion to end life-threatening deprivation, reverse austerity measures and mitigate the worst impacts of climate change must therefore be the immediate task for campaigners and activists in all countries.
• The world right now is preoccupied with the slowdown in growth in the developed countries, and declining growth rates in the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.  But that may be the ‘new normal’ for those countries, as the populations of the developed countries are leveling off and aging, as is that of China, so that the giant manufacturing/export machine that turned raw materials and cheap labor into goods for export to the rich countries of the West and East Asia will have to be retooled to produce for domestic and export markets that are low-income. But the chief problem for the global economy going forward is how to enable the 90% of tomorrow’s work force growing up in countries with poor governance to become productive workers in the future.  That will mean a focus on creating cities that work – that can be effective nodes in the productive/creative networks of the world – in countries that currently lack them.  That will be the real challenge for returning to dynamic global economic growth.

To conclude, considering the current global poverty, hunger, disease, and human life needs; international militarization and obscene levels of military spending; unsustainable economic, political, cultural, and ecological structures of power; social and economic injustice and the systematic violation of universal human rights; and rampant ecological degradation and disregard for the sacredness of all life,

We like to re-emphasize;

• Life-serving environmental stewardship,
• The fulfillment of universal basic human needs worldwide,
• Economic and social well-being,
• An innovative development model based on the recognition of and respect for human rights and the Rights of Nature,
• Values-led education, economics, business, finance, politics, good governance, transparency, and full accountability.