Comparative Planning Cultures or Argentina and the Fund

Comparative Planning Cultures

Author: Bishwapriya Sanyal

Are there significant variations in the ways planners in different nations have influenced urban, regional, and national development? Do such variations arise from differences in planning cultures, meaning the collective ethos and dominant attitude of planners in different nations towards the appropriate roles of the state, market forces, and civil society? How are such professional cultures formed? Are they indigenous and immutable, or do they evolve with social, political, and economic changes both within and outside the national territories? Specifically, what has been the impact of the intensification of global interconnectedness in trade, capital flows, labor migration, and technological connectivity on national planning cultures?

Comparative Planning Cultures addresses these questions, drawing on the planning experience in ten nations and at different territorial levels. The result is an understanding of planning culture that is complex and dynamic-in contrast to traditional notions of culture that evoke a sense of immutability and inheritance of unchanging social attributes of planners. The volume concludes that there is no cultural nucleus or core planning culture, no social gene that can be decoded to reveal the cultural DNA of planning practice of any nation.

Table of Contents:

1	Hybrid planning cultures : the search for the global cultural commons	3
2	Planning cultures in transition	29
3	Space of flows, space of places : materials for a theory of urbanism in the information age	45
4	Planning culture in Iran : centralization and decentralization and local governance in the twentieth century (the case for urban management and planning)	67
5	Modernity confronts tradition : the professional planner and local corporatism in the rebuilding of China's cities	91
6	Planning cultures in two Chinese transitional cities : Hong Kong and Shenzhen	113
7	Understanding planning cultures : the Kolkata paradox	145
8	Does planning culture matter? : Dutch and American models in Indonesian urban transformations	165
9	Contending planning cultures and the urban built environment in Mexico City	193
10	The developmental state and the extreme narrowness of the public realm : the twentieth century evolution of Japanese planning culture	223
11	The nature of difference : traditions of law and government and their effects on planning in Britain and France	259
12	The Netherlands : a culture with a soft spot for planning	285
13	Picking the paradoxes : a historical anatomy of Australian planning cultures	309
14	U.S. planning culture under pressure : major elements endure and flourish in the face of crises	331

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Argentina and the Fund: From Triumph to Tragedy

Author: Michael Mussa

The catastrophic crisis of late 2001 and early 2002 marks the tragic end to Argentina's initially successful, decade-long experiment with sound money and market-oriented economic reform. The IMF consistently supported Argentina's stabilization and reform efforts in the decade leading up to the current crisis, and often pointed to many of Argentina's policies as examples for other emerging market economies to emulate.

In this analysis, former IMF Chief Economist Michael Mussa addresses the obvious question: What went wrong in Argentina and what critical errors did the IMF make in either supporting inappropriate policies or in failing to press for alternatives that might have avoided catastrophe? He emphasizes that the persistent inability of the Argentine authorities at all levels to run a responsible fiscal policy-even when the Argentine economy was performing very well-was the primary avoidable cause of the country's catastrophic financial collapse. The IMF failed to press aggressively for a more responsible fiscal policy. Mussa also addresses the role of the Convertibility Plan, which linked the Argentine peso rigidly at parity with the U.S. dollar and played a central role in both the initial success and ultimate collapse of Argentina's stabilization and reform efforts. While the IMF accepted this plan as a basic policy choice of the Argentine authorities so long as it remained viable, it erred in the summer of 2001 by extending further massive support for unsustainable policies, rather than insisting on a new policy strategy that might have mitigated some of the damage from a crisis that had become unavoidable.

Mussa moves on to discuss what needs to be done to restore economic and financial stability in Argentina and begin the process of recovery, including the proper role that the IMF and the international community. He also examines what the IMF can do to avoid repeating the types of mistakes it made in the tragic case of Argentina.

Author Biography: Michael Mussa, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, served as Economic Counsellor and Director of the Department of Research at the International Monetary Fund from 1991-2001, where he was responsible for advising the Management of the Fund and the Fund's Executive Board on broad issues of economic policy and in providing analysis of ongoing developments in the world economy. Dr. Mussa's main areas of research are international economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and municipal finance. He has published widely in these fields in professional journals and research volumes. By appointment of President Ronald Reagan, Dr. Mussa served as a Member of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers from August of 1986 to September of 1988.

Foreign Affairs

In late 2001, the government of Argentina defaulted on its outstanding debt, the largest sovereign default in history. The banking system collapsed, and the Argentine economy went into deep economic depression. Mussa, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, here gives a brief and cogent account of what happened, why it happened, and how it might have been avoided. He also addresses the role of the IMF (which provided exceptional financial support to Argentina in 2001) and lessons for future IMF lending. The fundamental problem, according to Mussa, is that Argentina's fiscal condition (federal and provincial) was inconsistent with its Convertibility Plan, which involved a strong commitment to one-to-one convertibility between the peso and the U.S. dollar. One or the other had to yield, but neither did until the government's financial crisis. He might have added that Argentina's decision to join Mercosur in 1993 committed it to greater economic engagement with crisis-prone Brazil, which further reduced the probability that the Convertibility Plan could survive indefinitely after its initial successes.