Summers: Developing World Feels They Get Airports from China, Lectures from Us and We’re Not Fixing That

While speaking to Bloomberg on Friday, Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, Larry Summers stated that “we just aren’t providing resources to the world on the scale that the Chinese are.” And that some people in the developing world feel they get “lectures from us and airports from the Chinese…and we’ve got to be fixing that very aggressively.”

Summers said that he thought the tone of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s speech on China was “appropriate.”

He added, “There’s a phrase in the export control community: small garden, high walls, that I think captures exactly the philosophy that you need to figure out what absolutely needs to be restricted and restricted strongly and not try to go after everything else. I remain concerned, though, that the United States needs to go beyond a wish list in its negotiation strategy, that it needs to negotiate privately rather than publicly, that it needs to recognize that an important part of what we’re doing has to be strengthening our own capacities at home in terms of innovation, strengthening our capacities for cooperation with the rest of the world. Look, we have renounced new trade agreements as a major tool of strategy. We have declined to reduce tariffs, even where reducing tariffs would improve the competitiveness of our exports. And we just aren’t providing resources to the world on the scale that the Chinese are.”

Summers continued, “I remarked last week on your show about people in the developing world who felt they got lectures from us and airports from the Chinese, and even though they agreed with the lectures from us, the airports really weren’t the same as the lectures. They were vastly more valuable, and we’ve got to be fixing that very aggressively. And I don’t see that in the approach that we’re taking to the international financial institutions in terms of promoting their expansion. I don’t see that in terms of ways in which we’re trying to rally countries towards economic integration.”

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