Why Globalization Works FROM THE PUBLISHER
The debate on globalization has reached a level of passionate intensity that inhibits rational discussion. In this book, one of the world's foremost economic commentators explains how globalization works and why it makes sense. Martin Wolf confronts the charges against globalization, delivers a devastating critique of each and outlines a more hopeful future.
SYNOPSIS
Wolf (associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times of London) provides a defense of capitalist globalization or "a liberal international economic order" to a general audience. He first offers an argument for a liberal market economy, utilizing fairly standard references to the "mutually reinforcing and interdependent relationship between the market and the democratic state," and sketches a positive portrait of the history of globalization. While conceding the accuracy of some (very few) criticisms of market globalization, he devotes much of the work to rebutting critics arguments about globalization being a cause of global impoverishment, corporate domination, threats to the sovereignty of the democratic state, and the race to the bottom in environmental and social regulation. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
The author, a Financial Times editor, makes a conventional economist's argument for globalization that is not likely to convince many skeptics. His faith is that growth and everything else good comes from "the market," while any problems with globalization must be the fault of governments. Wolf doesn't consider that economic processes redistribute power and therefore transform politics and the possibilities of government action. Like so many economists, he analyzes primarily aggregate statistics: gray averages. For example, using aggregate figures he argues that workers in rich countries are paid more because they are much more productive than workers in poor countries are. Thus high-paid workers need not fear that competition from low-paid workers will undermine their economic security. The reason, he explains, is that workers in developed countries work, on average, with far less capital per worker. While this is true in aggregate, for a particular transnational firm deciding whether to locate a new factory in Shanghai or Chicago, the difference in productivity will rarely be as great as the wage differential. Therefore, as long as other costs and risks do not overwhelm the benefit of cheaper labor, there is a long-term tendency for investment and jobs to flow toward low-wage countries. Wolf neglects the profound consequences of relative labor immobility (because of immigration restrictions and cultural barriers) compared with the mobility of products, many services and capital, one of the characteristic features of contemporary globalization. Agent, Felicity Bryan, U.K. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
By the early 1980s, a number of distinguished economists had amassed compelling evidence that outward-oriented trade policies were far more likely than protectionism to lead to economic growth. The evidence was contained in two multi-country research projects-one at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), led by Ian Little and others, and the other at the National Bureau of Economic Research, directed by Jagdish Bhagwati and Anne Krueger-and in a series of studies at the World Bank.
Today, however, advocates of globalization are gaining the upper hand again. Bhagwati's strikingly successful defense of open markets in his recent book In Defense of Globalization has been bolstered by another influential pro-globalization voice, that of Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. Wolf's weekly columns have already established him as one of the world's most respected economic journalists. Now his ambitious new book, Why Globalization Works, offers a patient and persuasive refutation of many of the arguments most frequently marshaled by critics of trade liberalization.
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