Category Archives: Books

Making Globalization More Inclusive

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Making Globalization More Inclusive:

Lessons from experience with adjustment policies

Edited by Marc Bacchetta (WTO and University of Neuchâtel), Emmanuel Milet (Geneva School of Economics and Management) and José-Antonio Monteiro (WTO and University of Neuchâtel)

Policies aimed at helping workers adjust to the impact of trade or technological changes can provide a helping hand to the workforce and increase the benefits of open trade and new technologies. This publication contributes to the discussion on how governments can help make international trade more inclusive and ensure that the benefits of open trade are spread more widely.

Click here for further details and to download a copy of the book

Richard Baldwin – The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

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“Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today’s wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As Richard Baldwin explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalization that is drastically different from the old. In the 1800s, globalization leaped forward when steam power and international peace lowered the costs of moving goods across borders. This triggered a self-fueling cycle of industrial agglomeration and growth that propelled today’s rich nations to dominance. That was the Great Divergence. The new globalization is driven by information technology, which has radically reduced the cost of moving ideas across borders…” [Publisher’s book website]

Reviews / Comments

Book review by Diane Coyle, November 2016

Book review by Bradford Delong, March 2017

Book review by The Economist, November 2016

Book review by Juliet Webster in The Times, January 2017

Book review by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, December 2016

 

The Age of Sustainable Development

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” Jeffrey D. Sachs is one of the world’s most perceptive and original analysts of global development. In this major new work he presents a compelling and practical framework for how global citizens can use a holistic way forward to address the seemingly intractable worldwide problems of persistent extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and political-economic injustice: sustainable development.

Sachs offers readers, students, activists, environmentalists, and policy makers the tools, metrics, and practical pathways they need to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. Far more than a rhetorical exercise, this book is designed to inform, inspire, and spur action. Based on Sachs’s twelve years as director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, his thirteen years advising the United Nations secretary-general on the Millennium Development Goals, and his recent presentation of these ideas in a popular online course, The Age of Sustainable Development is a landmark publication and clarion call for all who care about our planet and global justice.” [Publisher’s book website]

Author’s book website

Reviews / Comments

Book review by  Matthew E. Kahn in Journal of Economic Literature, 53(3), September 2015.

Book review by Richard N. Cooper in Foreign Affairs, September 2015.

Book review by James H. Brown in BioScience, August 2015.

Book review by Pavithra Rao in The Africa Report, June 2015.

Book review by Fred Pearce in New Scientist, March 2015.

Book review by Japhy Wilson in Human Geography, 8(2), 2015.

Why the West Rules — for Now

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Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West’s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last?… [Publisher’s book website]

Author’s book website

Book review in The Economist, October 2010

Book review by George Walden in The Guardian, January 2011

Book review by Dr Ricardo Duchesne in Reviews in History (review no.1091)

Book review by Orville Schell in The New York Times, December 2010

Book review by Jonathan Healey

Exodus: Immigration and Mulitculturalism in the 21st Century

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Mass international migration is a response to extreme global inequality, and immigration has a profound impact on the way we live. Yet our views – and those of our politicians – remain caught between two extremes: popular hostility to migrants, tinged by xenophobia and racism; and the view of business and liberal elites that ‘open doors’ are both economically and ethically imperative. With migration set to accelerate, few issues are so urgently in need of dispassionate analysis – and few are more incendiary.Here, world-renowned economist Paul Collier seeks to defuse this explosive subject. Exodus looks at how people from the world’s poorest societies struggle to migrate to the rich West: the effects on those left behind and on the host societies, and explores the impulses and thinking that inform Western immigration policy. Migration, he concludes, is a fact, and we urgently need to think clearly about its possibilities and challenges: it is not a question of whether migration is good or bad, but how much is best?Paul Collier is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and a former director of Development Research at the World Bank. He is the author of, among others, the award-winning The Bottom Billion and The Plundered Planet.  [Publisher’s book website]

Book review by Rupert Edis in The Telegraph, November 2013

Book review by Ian Birrell in The Guardian, November 2013

Book review by Kenan Malik in The Independent, October 2013

Book review by Geoffrey Cameron in Migration Studies, 1 (3): 375-377, November 2013

Devaluing to Prosperity: Misaligned Currencies and Their Growth Consequences

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Experts have long questioned the effect of currency undervaluation on overall GDP growth. They have viewed the underlying basis for this policy intervention in currency markets to keep the price of the home currency cheap as doomed to failure on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Moreover, the view has been that overvalued currencies hurt economic growth but undervalued currencies cannot help in growth acceleration. A parallel belief has been that the real exchange rate that is, a country’s competitive ranking cannot be affected by merely changing the nominal exchange rate. This view is grounded in the belief, and expectation, that inflation follows any devaluation of currency. Hence, the conclusion that the real exchange rate cannot be affected by policy.

However, given China’s remarkable performance in recent decades, this traditional view is being reexamined. China devalued its currency by large amounts in the 1980s and early 1990s; instead of inflation, it achieved high growth. Today, there is near-universal demand for China to significantly revalue its currency.

This book examines the veracity of various propositions relating to currency misalignments, and their effect on various items of policy interest. The author subjects more than a century of global exchange rate management and growth outcomes to rigorous empirical analysis and demonstrates convincingly that a country can systematically devalue and yet prosper.

The analysis helps in interpreting several phenomena, especially for the last three decades, which have witnessed high economic growth in developing countries, a widening of global imbalances, and a sharp increase in reserve accumulation, particularly among high-growth Asian economies. The book shows that these events are strongly linked via a consistent policy of currency undervaluation in Asian economies. [Publisher’s book website]

Book review by Michael P. Dooley in Journal of Economic Literature, 51(3): 890-891, September 2013. (Scroll down to Section F International Economics.)

Book review by G. Srinivasan in Frontline, March 2013.

Self-Enforcing Trade: Developing Countries and WTO Dispute Settlement

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The World Trade Organization — backbone of today’s international commercial relations — requires member countries to self-enforce exporters’ access to foreign markets. Its dispute settlement system is the crown jewel of the international trading system, but its benefits still fall disproportionately to wealthy nations. Could the system be doing more on behalf of developing countries? In Self-Enforcing Trade, Chad P. Bown explains why the answer is an emphatic “yes.”

Bown argues that as poor countries look to the benefits promised by globalization as part of their overall development strategy, they increasingly require access to the WTO dispute settlement process to protect their trading interests. Unfortunately, the practical realities of WTO dispute settlement as it currently stands create a number of hurdles that prevent developing countries from enjoying the trading system’s full benefits. This book confronts these challenges.

Self-Enforcing Trade examines the WTO’s “extended litigation process,” highlighting the tangle of international economics, law, and politics that participants must master. He identifies the costs that prevent developing countries from disentangling the self-enforcement process and fully using the WTO system as part of their growth strategies. Bown assesses recent efforts to help developing countries overcome those costs, including the role of the Advisory Centre on WTO Law and development focused NGOs. Bown’s proposed Institute for Assessing WTO Commitments tackles the largest remaining obstacle currently limiting developing country engagement in the WTO’s selfenforcement process — a problematic lack of information, monitoring, and surveillance. [Publisher’s book website]

Book review by Kent Jones in The Review of International Economics, 19 (4): 789-790, September 2011.

Book review by Soo Yeon Kim in The Review of International Organizations, 5 (4): 497-499, December 2010.

Book review by John Whalley in Governance, 23(4): 700-702, October 2010.

Book review by Bashar H. Malkawi in Political Studies Review, 9(3): 392, September 2011. (Scroll down to International Relations.)

Book review by Elimma C. Ezeani in Journal of International Trade Law and Policy, 9(2): 213 – 215, 2010.

Book review by Diane A. Desierto in Yale Journal of International Law, 35: 538-541, January 2010

Book review by Anastasios Gourgourinis in International Community Law Review, 12(3): 391-393, July 2010

 

The Role of Government in East Asian Economic Development: Comparative Institutional Analysis

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“The role of government in East Asian economic development has been a contentious issue. Two competing views have shaped enquiries into the source of the rapid growth of the high-performing Asian economies and attempts to derive a general lesson for other developing economies: the market-friendly view, according to which government intervenes little in the market, and the developmental state view, in which it governs the market…” [Publisher’s book website]

Book review by Terutomo Ozawa in The Journal of Asian Studies, 58 (2): 453-454, May 1999.

The Quest for Prosperity: How Developing Economies Can Take Off

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“How can developing countries grow their economies? Most answers to this question center on what the rich world should or shouldn’t do for the poor world. In The Quest for Prosperity, Justin Yifu Lin–the first non-Westerner to be chief economist of the World Bank–focuses on what developing nations can do to help themselves…” [Publisher’s book website]
Reviews / Comments
Book review by Monika Kerekes in Journal of Economics, 109(1), May 2013.

Book review by Xuan Nguyen in The Journal of International Trade & Economic Development, 22(2), April 2013

Book review by Ashley Aarons in Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (DCED), April 2013

Book review by Richard N. Cooper in Foreign Affairs, January/February 2013.

Pragmatic search for path to prosperity by Martin Wolf in Financial Times, October 2012.

Book review by Howard Davies in Times Higher Education, October 2012.

The Globalization Paradox Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can’t Coexist

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“For a century, economists have driven forward the cause of globalization in financial institutions, labour markets, and trade. Yet there have been consistent warning signs that a global economy and free trade might not always be advantageous. Where are the pressure points? What could be done about them?…” [Publisher’s Book Website]

Author’s Book Presentation, August 2012.

Author’s Book Presentation, May 2011.

Author’s Lecture, December 2011.

Reviews / Comments 

Book Review by Kate Saffin in LSE Review of Books, August 2012.

Book Review by Shahid Yusuf in The Development Economics, 50(4), December 2012.

The Lessons From Rodrik’s Globalization Paradox by Antoaneta Dimitrova in Eurosearch, December 2011.

Book Review by Simon Lester in World Trade Review, 10, June 2011.

Book Review by Duncan Green in From Poverty to Power, OXFAM Blog, June 2011.

Book Review by William R. Cline in Peterson Institute for International Economics, May 2011.

Book Review by Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post, March 2011.

Book Review by Matthew Yglesias in Think Progressive, March 2011.

Book Review by  Richard N. Cooper in Foreign Affairs, February 2011.