Vice President’s Plan to Change Method to Measure GDP (Letter to the Editor)

Michael Evans’ April 6 commentary “Misguided Solution for debtors” did eh:. excellent job of refuting .Vice. President Al Gore’s plan’ to sell the gold reserves of the International Monetary Fund (IMF); Financing Third World debt forgiveness with IMF gold sales would debase the dollar signaling the very same monetary irresponsibility that undermined’ currencies in Asia.

Mr. Evans’ most astute, observation, however, is his abbreviated linkage of Mr. Gore’s gold sales pro-. posal to the vice president’s 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance.” Mr. Gore’s Davos, Switzerland, proposal is a means of implementing his grand scheme for ecological restruc- turfing of the world economy. According to Mr Gore’s book, the” Global Marshall Plan,: “will ‘require the wealthy nations to allocate money for transferring environmentally helpful technologies to the Third World and to help impoverished nations achieve new pattern of sustainable eco- nomic progress.To work, any such effort will also require wealthy nations to make a transition themselves that will be in some ways more ;’wrenching` than that’, of the Third World; simply because powerful established patterns;’ will be disrupted.”

In this context, it is not surprising that IMF gold sales would depreci¬ate the dollar and weaken U.S. economic growth. Mr. Gore’s objective is to reduce prosperity as it is currently measured and to introduce radically different standards for measuring gross domestic product (GDP) and economic productivity. Measured in this “green GDP,” what We how’ consider economic_ decline, would be counted as a gain for ecological sustainability.