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"A damning denunciation of things as they are, and a platform for how we can do better."—Andrew Leonard, Salon
Four years after he outlined the challenges our increasingly interdependent world was facing in Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz offered his agenda for reform. Now in paperback, Making Globalization Work offers inventive solutions to a host of problems, including the indebtedness of developing countries, international fiscal instability, and worldwide pollution. Stiglitz also argues for the reform of global financial institutions, trade agreements, and intellectual property laws, to make them better able to respond to the growing disparity between the richest and poorest countries. Now more than ever before, globalization has gathered the peoples of the world into one community, bringing with it a need to think and act globally. This trenchant, intellectually powerful book is an invaluable step in that process. This paperback edition contains a brand-new preface.
Boring Read
| Customer Rating:   | | This book is extremely boring and very subjective. If you are looking for an objective well written easy to read book on globalization and the dynamics of our world economy then this is not the book for you. Lots of biased opinion. Also Stiglitz tends to be a master of the obvious at times regarding global economic issues. Nothing new here and no real new going forward insight. |
Insightful
| Customer Rating: | | Stiglitz provides insight as well as information to enhance understanding of the economic globalization process, its weaknesses, strengths and potential for great good for all humans. His work is mature in perspective, contrasting with the "gotta have it now" attitude urged by the Bush Administration. This work has maintained its timeliness and the ideas are relevant in understanding today's economic options. |
Fabulous Read
| Customer Rating: | | I have read 2 books from Stiglitz so far, and this book is by far one of the finest I have read on the topic ... extremely well written, clear, concise and lucid ... this book leaves no doubt about Stiglitz's excellent intellectual capacity ... although I liked reading "The World Is Flat," by Thomas Friedman, a comparision of that with "Making Globalisation Work," makes Friedman look pedestrian and lacking in depth. |
an important contribution to the debate
| Customer Rating: | "Making Globalization Work" is a worthy follow-up to "Globalization and its Discontents". In fact, it is a more interesting read than the other book because it explores a broader array of issues. Here are some of its notable points.
Chapter 3 ("Making Trade Fair") documents the discrepancy between the rhetoric and the practice of developed countries that preach the virtues of free trade and push for greater trade liberalization in the developing countries while in the meantime broadly engaging in protectionism in areas that could benefit the developing countries. Erik Reinert would probably put it like this: Jeffersonian rhetoric, Hamiltonian practice. Although Stiglitz recognizes the damage of such a discrepancy, his proposal is not all out liberalization. His "extended market access proposal" would open the markets of the richer countries to the poorer countries without requiring reciprocity (he also argues for cutting agricultural subsidies in the rich countries and other such reforms). That means that the poor countries would be allowed to use certain policy tools (infant industry promotion) to assure development. Thus, Stiglitz holds a positions similar to that of Ha-Joon Chang, or Friedrich List and the German Historical School, for that matter: free trade trade has to be well-timed and the developing countries have to be given time to catch up.
Chapter 4 ("Patents, Profits, and People") provides a very good discussion of intellectual property. Stiglitz emphasizes that intellectual property protection is a means to an end: it is supposed to foster innovation. Thus, incentives for innovation (monopolistic rents) should be balanced against the inefficiencies that come from restricting the use of information, i.e. a public good. The author spends quite some time on patents in medical research. In case you read this book and become interested in the issue, Dean Baker's "The Conservative Nanny State" (provided online for free by Dean Baker himself) includes another interesting discussion of patents and copycat drugs.
Chapter 5 ("Lifting the Resource Curse") is about the problems that resource rich countries face. This includes abuses by private companies that exploit the resources, a potentially predatory state, and currency appreciation that imposes enormous costs on other export industries (the "Dutch disease"). Among many other things, Stiglitz proposes a way to combat currency appreciation: reserve of foreign currencies that could be used when the economy needs stabilizing.
These several chapters are just a taste of things found in the book. Other chapters address other important issues such as global warming (Chapter 6), country debt problems (Chapter 8), and the instability of the global reserve system (Chapter 9). Students fresh out of introductory economics courses should find themselves engaged as well: market failures (market power and all sorts of externalities), appropriate incentives, and public goods are some of the more frequently recurring themes.
If "Globalization and its Discontents" had the problem of being somewhat self-congratulatory, "Making Globalization Work" has a different flaw: its tone sometimes turns naive. For instance, these words can be found in the last chapter: "America's standing in the world has long been based not just on its economic and military power but on its moral leadership, on doing what is right and fair". Stiglitz thus treats certain unfair trade practices as a temporary aberration from the usual moral leadership. People who are quick to remember, among many other things, the CIA-led coups of democratically elected leaders in Iran (1950s) and Chile (1970s), the support for Latin American death squads or Indonesia when it invaded East Timor, will probably not take such remarks about "moral leadership" too seriously. There are other examples but I believe this one suffices for illustration.
Luckily, there is enough substance and interesting ideas in this book to make one overlook this one flaw. "Making Globalization Work" is a very important contribution to the debate and should be read by anyone interested in globalization and related issues. |
Prescription for the Discontents
| Customer Rating: | Since the Berlin Wall fell, the fact is, the next level of globalization has produced far too many losers and not enough winners. We are continuing to poison the environment; there are too many people living on less than $2 a day; states without security have left the door for terrorists and other malcontents to run rampant. It appears to some that the West will continue to underdevelop the rest of the world for the sake of increased profits.
Yet, there is some hope on the horizon. Joseph Stiglitz, former lead economist at the World Bank and Nobel Prize winner offers a great follow up to "Globalization and Its Discontents." Stiglitz delineates the problems that the current global economic regime has caused and offers some prescriptions to ameliorate them.
His look into the unequal demands from the West to underdeveloped countries is especially cogent. While trade barriers, industrial subsidies and tariffs are removed from developing countries, Europe and the United States continue their archaic agricultural subsidies. These subsidies improve the lot of a few (very few) farmers in the West, yet, make prices so artificially low that it erases the comparative advantage of developing countries in the agricultural system.
Other global issues, such as Global Warming, the debt of the developing world and the issues facing nations with only primary production are also well elaborated. As Global Warming is a global issue, it should be dealt with as such. Stiglitz' blame rest firmly on the United States for the continuing problems. Jubilee type initiatives are pushed for debt relief; and, development towards secondary industry is suggested for those nations, such as Botswana, caught in the Resource Trap.
I did have a few problems with the work. Corruption, both corporate and national, receives only lip service from Stiglitz in this book. There are a few of his familiar jabs at the International Monetary Fund, which after reading "Globalization and Its Discontents," and "Rethinking the Asian Miracle" become trite and dull. These made the book appear to be slanted against both the IMF and his successors at the World Bank.
But, my biggest issue involved the "global greenback." Stiglitz correctly points to the currency reserve regime as an inducer of instability and a extractor of global surplus from developing to developed countries. He also correctly assesses that we should re-make the reserve system as Bretton Woods had done in the 1940s. Yet, his method is pie-in-the-sky, at best and crazy at worst. Now I am by practice a pro-Internationalist and believe in more global governance. Yet, his "global greenback" regime to replace the holding of dollars or euros is unworkable, all the reasons for which I'm not even going to try to go into here.
In total, Stiglitz work is very good for its purposes. His ability to take his knowledge of the global economy and put it into words is unparalleled by any other major economist. This book should be a must read in concert with his "Globalization and Its Discontents" and Sen's "Development as Freedom." Add it to your shopping cart / wish list.
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