Making Globalization Work

Resumen del libro

Four years after his global bestseller, Joseph Stiglitz now brings the story up to the present, examining how change has occurred even more rapidly since then, proposing solutions and looking into the future. Here he puts forward radical new ways of dealing with the crippling indebtedness of developing countries, a new system of global reserves to overcome international financial instability, and an economically incentivised framework for dealing with energy pollutions which create global warming and which threaten us on a planetary scale. He argues convincingly for the reform of global institutions such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank to make them truly capable of responding to the problems of our age and shows why treating developing countries more fairly is not only morally right, but because it increases global public goods, is ultimately to the advantage of the developed world too.

Above all, Stiglitz argues we need to change the way we think. Now more than ever before, globalization is bringing the countries and the peoples of the world into one interdependent community, bringing with it a need to think and act globally. This trenchant, intellectually powerful and inspiring book is a step in the process.

'Uniquely authoritative'
Sunday Telegraph

By Joseph Stiglitz, author of Making Globalization Work

Some of the proposals in Making Globalization Work include:

Trade: Five years ago, the advanced industrial countries, recognizing how unfair previous trade agreements had been to developing countries, committed themselves to a Development Round. Since then, Europe and America have reneged on their promises. Rich nations should simply open their trade barriers to poorer ones without reciprocity or economic or political conditions. Migration should be liberalized so unskilled workers can travel to where they are most needed. This would do far more for global economic efficiency, and for development, than capital market liberalization, which has been at the center of the trade agenda for years.
Intellectual Property: One size-fits-all policies typically do not work, and this is especially so for intellectual property. Intellectual property protection should be tailored to the stage of development. Bio-piracy (of poor nations by corporations) must be stopped, and indigenous knowledge must be protected from foreign appropriators. The poor must have access to life saving medicines. The current system is failing doubly: both in access to existing medicine and in developing new medicines focused on diseases prevalent in poor countries. Making Globalization Work explains that there are alternatives that do better on both accounts.
Natural Resources: While most developing countries lack resources, a few are endowed with an abundance of natural resources, but surprisingly, these have actually done so much worse than the others that economists talk about the natural resource curse. Resource-rich countries must police their own institutions to avoid corruption, which so often results in these countries getting less than full value for their resources, and learn to regard resources as an endowment for the future. But the developed countries can help, by, for instance, attacking bank secrecy and by demanding transparency (allowing companies only to deduct payments to governments when they are publicly disclosed). With these reforms, natural resources can become the blessing they should be, rather than the curse they have been.
Environment: The benefits of making economic globalization work better may be completely undermined by environmental degradation including global warming. No problem is more global. With the world's largest polluter refusing to do its part, the world is at an impasse. Making Globalization Work shows how this impasse can be broken through a common global tax on carbon emissions, which could reduce emissions efficiently and fairly. I also explain how not paying the costs of the environmental degradation should be an unfair subsidy, which the WTO prohibits. Europe can and should bring a case to stop this unfair trade practice, by the United States or any other rogue nation willing to put the global environment in jeopardy, simply to preserve its energy profligate life-style.
Multinational Corporations: Multinationals have rightly been at the center of the storm over globalization - they have been responsible for many of the most important benefits (access to markets, transfer of technology) and the largest costs (such as environmental degradation.) While the global corporate social responsibility movement has made a difference, it is not enough. Making Globalization Work explains why. It explains too why Adam Smith was wrong: firms in pursuing their own interests do not necessarily lead to the well-being of society as a whole, and why the problems are greater with multinationals operating across borders than with domestic corporations. And Making Globalization Work explains what can be done how to harness the power of global corporations, so that the world receives the benefits, without incurring the unacceptable costs, how to curtail the growing threat of global monopolies, and how to ensure that executives and corporations are held responsible for their actions, such as polluting.
Burden of Debt: Throughout the developing world, the crushing burden of debt is stifling development. What's worse, the problem has been a recurrent one, and has afflicted countries that have seemingly been poorly managed and those that have been well managed alike. Making Globalization Work explains the underlying source of the problem, and it presents proposals both how this debt can be restructured and how to prevent a recurrence of the problem.
Global Instability: The world has been marked by enormous global financial instability, and the developing countries have paid a high price. Making Globalization Work explains how the international community can help developing countries cope with this instability; but even more important, it presents a bold new proposal of a new global reserve system, that would simultaneously reduce this instability and provide new resources that could be used to finance the most important needs facing the world.
Reforming the international economic institutions: Globalization has meant that we have all become more interdependent, and increased interdependence has heightened the importance of acting together. The need for international institutions, including the international economic institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), intended to regulate global trade, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), intended to ensure global financial stability, has never been greater; but confidence in these institutions has never been weaker. There is, in particular, a democratic deficit, exacerbated by America's penchant for unilateralism. Many of the failures can be understood as resulting from the lack of democratic accountability. Making Globalization Work includes reforms of these institutions that are likely to make them both more democratic and responsive.

Biografía del autor

Joseph E. Stiglitz es catedrático en Columbia University. Ha sido galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Economía y es autor de varios títulos de éxito sobre la globalización, la crisis financiera y la distribución de la riqueza.