Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of the New York Times bestselling book Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz here joins with fellow economist Andrew Charlton to offer a challenging and controversial argument about how globalization can actually help Third World countries to develop and prosper.
In Fair Trade For All, Stiglitz and Charlton address one of the key issues facing world leaders today--how can the poorer countries of the world be helped to help themselves through freer, fairer trade? To answer this question, the authors put forward a radical and realistic new model for managing trading relationships between the richest and the poorest countries. Their approach is designed to open up markets in the interests of all nations and not just the most powerful economies, to ensure that trade promotes development, and to minimize the costs of adjustments. The book illuminates the reforms and principles upon which a successful settlement must be based.
Vividly written, highly topical, and packed with insightful analyses, Fair Trade For All offers a radical new solution to the problems of world trade. It is a must read for anyone interested in globalization and development in the Third World.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel Prize-winning economist and ex-World Bank official Stiglitz is the leading mainstream critic of the free-trade, free-market "Washington Consensus" for developing countries. In this follow-up to his best-selling Globalization and its Discontents, he and Charlton, a development expert, present their vision of a liberalized global trade regime that is carefully geared to the interests of poorer countries. They recap a critique, much of it based on Stiglitz's academic work, of orthodox trade theories, noting the real-world constraints and complications that undermine the assumption that unregulated free trade is always a boon, and analyze the bias towards developed countries in previous trade agreements. They call for the current round of trade negotiations to refocus on principles of equity and social justice that accord developing countries "special and differential treatment." The authors present detailed policy prescriptions, including measures to open developed countries to developing countries' exports of textiles and farm products and to ease the temporary migration of workers between countries; their most far-reaching proposal is a scheme to open every country to goods from any other country whose economy is smaller and poorer than its own. The authors' treatise is readable, but rather dry and technical and sometimes politically naive, particularly in glossing over the problem of workers in developed economies whose jobs are threatened by trade with developing countries. The book isn't quite right for a general audience, but it has a sophisticated, wide-ranging discussion of world trade, intriguing new ideas and the Stiglitz byline, so those already interested in trade issues will consider it a must-read.
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