Globalization and its discontents, what countries are discussed in this book by Joseph Stiglitz?

Question

can you give me a list of all the countries discussed in the book, and a brief summary of how the IMF and WB affected them

Answer 1

Joseph Eugene "Joe" Stiglitz (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist and a member of the Columbia University faculty. He is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal (1979) and the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (2001). Former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, he is known for his critical view of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

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 and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Stiglitz is the most cited economist in the world, as of June 2008.

Making Globalization Work (2006) surveys the iniquities of the global economy, and the mechanisms by which developed countries exert an excessive influence over developing nations. Dr. Stiglitz argues that through recourse to various measures – be it overt trade tariffs, subtler subsidies, a patent system that developed countries are better prepared to navigate, or the damage done to poor countries by global pollution – the world is being both economically and politically destabilised, from which we will all suffer.

Making Globalization Work exposes the problems of how globalisation is currently being managed, the vested interests behind many decisions and the prospects for negotiating fairer terms for those worst affected. Dr Stiglitz tackles the problems immediately facing the world, arguing that strong, transparent institutions are needed to turn globalization to favour the world's poorest, and to address the democratic deficit that is so keenly felt across the world. He shows how an examination of incomplete markets can make corrective government policies desirable.

Stiglitz argues that economic opportunities are not widely enough available, that financial crises are too costly and too frequent, and that the rich countries have done too little to address these problems. Making Globalization Work is an optimistic book, offering the hope that global society has the will or the ability to address global problems and that international economic integration will ultimately prove a force for good. Making Globalization Work[20] had sold more than two million copies.

Stiglitz considers a pressing economic problem of our time when he argues that what we usually call "developing economies" are, in fact, not developing at all. Stiglitz, in Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), offers his views both of what has gone wrong and of what to do differently. But the book also focuses on who is to blame. According to Stiglitz, the story of failed development does have a villain, and the villain has been the IMF.

In Globalization and Its Discontents Stiglitz bases his argument for different economic policies on the themes that his decades of theoretical work have emphasized: namely, what happens when people lack the key information that bears on the decisions they have to make, or when markets for important kinds of transactions are inadequate or don't exist, or when other institutions that standard economic thinking takes for granted are absent or flawed. The implication of each of these absences or flaws is that free markets, left to their own devices, do not necessarily deliver the positive outcomes claimed for them by textbook economic reasoning that "assumes that people have full information, can trade in complete and efficient markets, and can depend on satisfactory legal and other prescriptions. Stiglitz stresses the point: "Recent advances in economic theory" (in part referring to his own work) "have shown that whenever information is imperfect and markets incomplete, which is to say always, and especially in developing countries, then the invisible hand works most imperfectly."

As a result, Stiglitz continues, governments can improve the outcome by well-chosen interventions. At the level of national economies, when families and firms seek to buy too little compared to what the economy can produce, governments can fight recessions and depressions by using expansionary monetary and fiscal policies to spur the demand for goods and services. At the microeconomic level, governments can regulate banks and other financial institutions to keep them sound.

They can also use tax policy to steer investment into more productive industries and trade policies to allow new industries to mature to the point at which they can survive foreign competition. And governments can use a variety of devices, ranging from job creation to manpower training to welfare assistance, to put unemployed labor back to work and, at the same time, cushion the human hardship deriving from what — importantly, according to the theory of incomplete information, or markets, or institutions — is no one's fault.

Stiglitz complains bitterly that the IMF has done great damage through the economic policies it has prescribed that countries must follow in order to qualify for IMF loans, or for loans from banks and other private-sector lenders that look to the IMF to indicate whether a borrower is creditworthy.

The organization and its officials, he argues, have ignored the implications of incomplete information, inadequate markets, and unworkable institutions—all of which are especially characteristic of newly developing countries. As a result, Stiglitz argues, time and again the IMF has called for policies that conform to textbook economics but do not make sense for the countries to which the IMF is recommending them.

Stiglitz seeks to show that the consequences of these misguided policies have been disastrous, not just according to abstract statistical measures but in real human suffering, in the countries that have followed them.