Economic guru shuns anti-global movement

James Tobin, the hero of the anti-globalisers, disowned his would-be followers yesterday as shallow thinkers and accused them of "abusing" his 30-year-old plan for a tax on currency speculation. Mr Tobin, 83, a Nobel prize-winning economist, now retired and living in New Haven, Connecticut, said he had refused an invitation from one of the principal anti-globalisation groups, Attac [Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens], to address a meeting in Paris.

"I think that I have been misunderstood. I think that my name is being abused in the name of ideas which I don't support ... I have been hijacked ... I have nothing in common with this revolution against globalisation," Mr Tobin said in an interview with the German magazine, Der Spiegel, also published by the French newspaper, Le Monde.

In the early 1970s Mr Tobin proposed a 0.5 per cent levy on short-term currency speculations, as a way of avoiding financial crises after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. The proceeds would have been given to developing countries through the World Bank.

His idea, mostly forgotten for 30 years, has become a totem of the anti-globalisation movement. It is the centrepiece of the manifesto of the French-based group, Attac, which sees the "Tobin Tax" as a first step towards dismantling allegedly "ultra-liberal" [ie: ultra- capitalist] international institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

In an attempt to broaden his appeal to the "new Left" before presidential and parliamentary elections next year, the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, recently spoke favourably of the "Tobin Tax". France and Germany are expected to raise the issue at an informal meeting of EU finance ministers in Liège later this month.

In the interview published yesterday, Mr Tobin said the sudden interest of European governments was a pretence. "I don't think they would really consider it. They don't want to saddle themselves with another tax," he said. "All the finance ministers who count for something are against it, including [President] Bush's Treasury Secretary, as was [President] Clinton's before him." Mr Tobin, an adviser to President John Kennedy in the 1960s and a professor at Yale for 38 years until 1988, said he still believed his tax was a good idea but said, it had no chance of being implemented.

He said, however, that his idea had nothing to do with the anti-trade, anti-capitalist agenda of the anti-globalising movement. "I support free trade," he said. "I support the World Bank and the IMF and the World Trade Organisation, that these movements hate ..."

"Their intentions may be good but their ideas have not been thought through ... I think that I have been misunderstood. My name has been abused for priorities which are not mine. The Tobin Tax would not be a springboard for the reforms these people want. But what can I do?"

Far from being a threat to the Third World, Mr Tobin said, free trade was the best means of increasing the prosperity of the poorest countries. Far from dismantling the World Bank and IMF and other institutions, he said, they should be strengthened and their role widened.