Can Markets Secure Economic and Social Human Rights?

Abstract

In recent years, state inefficiency in delivering some public goods to everyone has been the major argument set forth by those who argue that markets should play a more active role in providing those goods and services that are needed to secure human rights. Despite the relative consensus that markets cannot substitute the state, in many parts of the world pressures have been felt for privatising social security and water distribution, for example. This article argues that markets do not speak the same language as human rights and therefore reinforces that they are not fully prepared to play the role of a supplier of goods and services as human rights, and specifically of the rights to social security and to water. There are three essential reasons for that. First, markets do not state social preferences; second, they are not accountable; and finally, they are ineffective. In essence, markets commodify human rights and while filling them with exchange value they empty them of political significance.

Keywords:

• human rights
• markets
• water
• social security

Notes on Contributor

Manuel Couret Branco is an associate professor of economics at the University of Évora, Portugal. He graduated first in economics and later in geography at the University of Paris, and received his PhD in economics at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School of High Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris. His main research interests concern the political economy of development and underdevelopment and the interaction of economic and non-economic factors in the development process, more specifically with respect to human rights. His latest publications in English include the book Economics versus Human Rights (Routledge, 2009), and the articles “Economics against Democracy” (Review of Radical Political Economics, 2012), “The Political Economy of the Human Right to Water” (Review of Radical Political Economics, 2010), and “Economics against Human Rights: The Conflicting Languages of Economics and Human Rights” (Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 2009).