[Developing countries] In virtually all the developing countries, the acceleration of industrial growth has brought an equally accelerated increase in government intervention in economic activity. In sectors other than transportation, power and basic services (and in those fields of industrial activity whose very magnitude makes private participation difficult or impossible), such participation merely obstructs and increases the cost of development and generates ever greater exclusion of the private sector from productive activities in which private enterprise has proven to be more efficient.
2. Those who aspire to replace private enterprise by government control forget that the spirit of enterprise, imagination, courage and creative genius are characteristic of the men who forged the machinery of progress in the continuous struggle that is private enterprise.
2. It is now quite clear what needs to be done to move national economies towards environmental sustainability, and it is clear that it is government that must take the initiative in at least six areas: strategic planning to take the long-term view on resource use; environmental taxation to begin to get into prices some of the large costs of environmental degradation; regulation where definite environmental standards have to be met; public investment in environmentally beneficial projects or infrastructure which do not yield a competitive financial return; stimulation of environmentally progressive markets such as energy efficiency; far greater provision of information and encouragement to potential green consumers; construction of an ecological-environmental indicator system.