The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) that took place in Johannesburg from the end of August 2002 brought into focus, again, the most critical world issues of poverty and the global environment.

Professor Eduardo Valencia, from the Pontifical Catholic University in Ecuador, presented a paper on the Principles of Solidarity Economics as a Critique of Neoliberalism and the Search for Alternatives, at one of the workshops organized there by the International Jesuit network for Development [IJND].

We offer here his views as they were presented in the last part of his paper, because they give a well-founded alternative view of liberal economics, as different from the adopted one in Japan and in other Western countries.

The first sections of Eduardo Valencia's paper are highly theoretical but they prepare the ground to his critique of neoliberalist capitalism. He believes that the actual crisis of humanity is mainly due to the control neoliberalism plays over economic policy.

There is no justification for the dominance of neoliberalism today. It is only the result of the power and greed of big multinational corporations.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union, symbolized by the collapse of the Berlin wall (1989), brought the fall of the communist social system in Europe, although not in East Asia, and made people believed in the victory of liberal capitalism. That euphoria ended ten years later with a clear capitalist crisis that, since the beginning of the '90s, is still strongly felt in Japan now.

Professor E. Valencia tries to bring back "economics" to its former position within the moral sciences, as Adam Smith's intention was. The actual location of Economics as part of the positive sciences has made it function essentially independent from any ethical position. The economy ceased to be human and became just a positive science. At the free market, people's profit or satisfaction of needs would become the sole motivation to influence the formation of demand and supply of goods, by fixing a price. It is, then, easy to calculate production, costs and profit. It is, also, feasible to measure the consumption trends. Supposedly, only within a free market environment could the economy be considered scientific and hence, viable.