Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy

How to manage the global economy - and whether humanity wishes to continue pushing it in an ever more market-oriented, transnational corporation-dominated, and capital-footloose direction - are the most important international questions of our time. This is a short and trenchant history of those organizations - the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and Group of Seven - which have promoted this economic globalization and which are now trying to manage what is in effect unmanageable. Walden Bello points to their manifest failings, seen in recurrent financial crises, the ever widening gulf between developing and industrialized countries, the persistence of gross inequalities and mass poverty. He reviews their crisis of legitimacy, examines the new ideas for reforming world economic management, and argues that a much more fundamental and radical shift of direction is required.