Making Globalization Work For The Least Developed Countries

The Nobel Prize-winning economist and leading critic of globalization offers a fresh new approach to the issue that explains how to restructure an unstable global financial system, how nations can grow economically without damaging the environment, and how to devise a framework for free and fair global trade. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The benefits of globalizations have failed to reach the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) for both domestic and international reasons. Internationally, LDCs continue to face daunting structural constraints, some of which have been inherited from their colonial past. This publication comprises the papers and statements presented at the United Nations Ministerial Conference of the LDCs which draw attention to issues and challenges facing LDCs and provide policy makers, practitioners and academics in LDCs with important policy guidance on the way forward.

"A damning denunciation of things as they are, and a platform for how we can do better."—Andrew Leonard, Salon Building on the international bestseller Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz offers here an agenda of inventive solutions to our most pressing economic, social, and environmental challenges, with each proposal guided by the fundamental insight that economic globalization continues to outpace both the political structures and the moral sensitivity required to ensure a just and sustainable world. As economic interdependence continues to gather the peoples of the world into a single community, it brings with it the need to think and act globally. This trenchant, intellectually powerful, and inspiring book is an invaluable step in that process.

One of the most notable changes in the world economy during the past three decades has been the diverging trends in the growth of the developing countries. This book examines the opportunities open to the least developed countries as they design their strategies to accelerate growth and alleviate poverty.

Joseph Stiglitz presents this thought-provoking analysis of the problems inherent in the world economic order, and how they can be solved.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.

This powerful, unsettling book gives us a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of global financial institutions by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. When it was first published, this national bestseller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank. Particularly concerned with the plight of the developing nations, he became increasingly disillusioned as he saw the International Monetary Fund and other major institutions put the interests of Wall Street and the financial community ahead of the poorer nations. Those seeking to understand why globalization has engendered the hostility of protesters in Seattle and Genoa will find the reasons here. While this book includes no simple formula on how to make globalization work, Stiglitz provides a reform agenda that will provoke debate for years to come. Rarely do we get such an insider's analysis of the major institutions of globalization as in this penetrating book. With a new foreword for this paperback edition.

[This book] focuses on policies that truly work, offering fresh new thinking about the questions that shape the globalization debate, including a plan to restructure a global financial system made unstable by America's debt, ideas for how countries can grow without degrading the environment, a framework for free and fair global trade, and much more. Throughout, [the author] reveals that economic globalization continues to outpace both the political structures and the moral sensitivity required to ensure a just and sustainable world. And he makes plain the real work that all nations must undertake to realize that goal.-Dust jacket.