US enterprises forging revolution despite state interventions: Razeen Sally in Sri Lanka

Dec 21, 2012 (LBO) - Private enterprise in the United States is transforming its economic structure using available economic freedoms despite excessive state interventions that has delayed a recovery, a top economist has said.



"It intervened far too much and misguidedly at home," Razeen Sally, a former London School of Economics professor who is now with the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, said in Colombo.

"Perhaps more relevant to the outside world there has been more serious gaps in American leadership abroad.

The biggest gap for me was on international trade. He (Obama) has been pretty defensive on trade.









His free trade comes with ifs and butts."

Sally, speaking at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute for International Relations, said the US was the world leader in driving free trade since 1945 and that leadership has been absent in the Obama administration after the financial crisis.

Robbed Liberties

"The result is that in this vacuum, without American leadership, international trade has drifted," Sally said.

"Others have also been defensive.

And there has been creeping protectionism.

"

During the Great Depression, the US through its Smoot-Hawley Act for example fired