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Joseph Stiglitz, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2002, 282 pp.
Joseph Stiglitz is currently professor of economics at Columbia. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Clinton administration between 1993 and 1997, and senior vice-president and chief economist of the World Bank between 1997 and 2000. In 2001, he shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economic Science. On the surface then, he has all the credentials of an American establishment-figure in the sphere of global economic policy. However, he was recently spokesman for several hundred economists who collectively condemned the Bush administration's latest tax cuts. And, as this event -- and this book -- indicate, his vast experience with the economics of globalization has cultivated a strong sympathy for the world's economically distressed nations and peoples. His radicalization is fairly recent, and in sharp contrast to the fundamental doctrines which underlie the current policies of the international economic agencies, notably the International Monetary Fund which, along with the World Bank, which originated in the Bretton Woods conference in 1944.
It follows that this book is devoted largely to a condemnation of the ideologies and policies of the IMF since the 1980's, and also, in some measure, of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) which was created in 1995 to govern international financial relations. Stiglitz notes that the original purpose of the IMF was to prevent another global depression, but that the goals of all these institutions became coopted during the 1980's by free market economics. They became "missionary institutions," part of a new "Washington Consensus" between the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury about the "right" policies for developing countries, and countries in economic crisis. system that would reinforce income differentials among wage earners and preferred instead to address benefit inadequacies within the structure of the existing pension system. The deadlock resulted in the expansion of the basic pension, the introduction of the ATP, and increased...