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| One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth | 
| Author: Dani Rodrik
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
Buy New: $21.88
You Save: $13.12 (37%)
New (31) from $21.88
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 13465
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 278
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1
ISBN: 0691129517
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.9
EAN: 9780691129518
ASIN: 0691129517
Publication Date: September 24, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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| Customer Reviews:
a terrific book on globalization and development August 7, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a terrific book. It begins with a good and troubling question: If economists are so smart, why have the most prominent success stories in economic development in recent decades been in countries (China, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) that ignored our advice? Rodrik's answer is that the advice - mainly Washington Consensus and then its follow-ons - was not so much wrong as a) premature and b) insufficiently flexible. His analysis of recent experience suggests that there are many ways to get growth started in a stagnant economy, and that it takes a very specific, informed, and open-minded local analysis - what he terms "growth diagnostics" - to determine what exactly are the binding constraints in each setting. Furthermore, policies that address those constraints must be politically viable, and that may mean tailoring them so that they create better incentives at the margin without destroying or transferring existing rents.
Once economic growth has started, THEN some of the more standard policy prescriptions, introduced carefully and gradually, may be appropriate and even necessary in order to make growth sustainable. Thus, for example, Rodrik argues that both China and India are moving now in more orthodox policy directions, and appropriately so, but that both relied on quite unorthodox measures to make their initial way out of stagnation.
There are many other issues addressed, including the importance of political arrangements that allow local needs and preferences to be expressed and the case for international trade policies that allow for diversity in national institutional arrangements. The book closes with a detailed and (to me) quite persuasive critique of the focus of the WTO on increasing trade for the sake of trade rather than considering more carefully which changes in trade policy actually make a difference in the lives of the world's poor. His analysis of the Doha Round suggests that, contrary to the received wisdom, a general worldwide liberalization of agricultural markets and removal of developed country subsidies would lead to only small reductions in poverty, and in fact would likely harm many poor consumers in many countries.
I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in globalization and development. It is extremely well written, though some sections may be slow going for non-economists. The overall analysis should be quite readable and thought-provoking for the general reader wishing to get a fresh perspective on these important issues.
Interesting, thought provoking book May 5, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
I might not agree with significant parts of the book, but it is interesting and, as is true with Rodrick's work generally, it makes one think. I suppose that the most problems that I had were with Chapter 4 on industrial policy. Take the issue of Coordination Externalities. There are large areas of the US market economy where these activities have been coordinated without government involvement (e.g., gasoline stations and cars, bee hives and farms or groves, the development of private highways during the first century and a half or so of US history, radio and television (coordinating stations and people who can listen to them), coordinating telephone exchanges, etc). Often government intervention has slowed or harmed that coordination. Do I agree that in theory that greenhouses and electrical grids go hand in hand? Sure. But it is not clear to me why the problem isn't that in some places the government is the one making these decisions. To me that would have been the hard question to answer. Anyway, I found the book interesting.
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