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RECOMMENDED READING
Globalization and Its Discontents
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Born in 1943, Joseph Stiglitz is an American economist and 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. In Globalization and Its Discontents, he draws upon his own personal experience as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton and later as chief economist at the World Bank.
A treasure trove of economic science and analysis, the book is a devastating indictment of the global policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. Beyond the fundamentally unsound economic theories underlying some of the policies of these organization, Stiglitz is most critical of their lack of transparency and accountability to the public, and their sometimes all-too-transparent pursuit of special corporate interests.
Stiglitz argues that because of these policies of "globalization," many countries in the developing world (and very few in the developed world) have suffered serious economic harm. In his view, a combination of fiscal austerity, high interest rates, trade liberalization, and insistence on the privatization of state assets has contributed to a bevy of unpleasant and unintended consequences, including the East Asian and Argentine financial crises, low levels of economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Russia's failure to make a clean conversion to a market economy.
As a result, instead of alleviating world poverty, the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank have often been responsible for making it worse.
In 2000 Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Columbia faculty, and has held the rank of University Professor since 2003. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute. To learn more about Stiglitz and his work, visit:
