Name: Globalization and its discontents
ISBN: 9780393051247

Globalization and its discontents

quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank. Particularly concerned with the plight of the developing nations, he became increasingly disillusioned as he saw the International Monetary Fund and other major institutions put the interests of Wall Street and the financial community ahead of the poorer nations. Those seeking to understand why globalization has engendered the hostility of protesters in Seattle and Genoa will find the reasons here. While this book includes no simple formula on how to make globalization work, Stiglitz provides a reform agenda that will provoke debate for years to come. Rarely do we get such an insider's analysis of the major institutions of globalization as in this penetrating book. With a new foreword for this paperback edition.

What Hacker News says

heuriskoJul 2021

Joseph Stiglitz has written some interesting books on corporate behaviour in developing countries, such as "Globalization and its Discontents".

The argument is, is that poorer countries, especially those with natural resources, would do better nurturing their own corporations, rather than creating policies to attract foreign corporations.

The end result of preferring foreign corporations is a race-to-the-bottom where the end result is that corporations become a law unto themselves, operating as if they miniature states within the host state.

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danansOct 2019

> See Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins

Or, for a far less conspiratorial take on the same phenomenon, read "Globalization and its Discontents" by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

In it you'll learn how institutions like the IMF treated open markets and no currency flow restrictions as a religion regardless of whether they made sense for the stage of development of the countries on which they imposed those as terms of their loans.

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adwhitOct 2018

> Please show your evidence that global trade is a zero sum game and that the "imperial core" has reaped all the benefits.

I didn't say it was zero sum. Poorer nations have experienced some growth, and a lot of that growth has been extracted by the West. Generally, the more a developing country has embraced globalization, the worse it has been exploited. This is not a hugely controversial statement.

If you'd really like to understand the power dynamics, you'll need to do some reading. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz's "Globalization and its Discontents" is a good start, though a little dated now.

See you on the picket lines, comrade!

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js8Mar 2026

No it wasn't. Look at Joseph Stiglitz (Globalization and Its Discontents) and Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans, Kicking Away the Ladder) for counter-examples.

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kipchakSep 2025

I agree that kleptocracy and incompetence are a important factor, but I'm not sure it's the only one. There's a correlation between corruption indices and low GDP but I'm not sure it's causal. For example the US scores only moderately in corruption index terms, but does quite well in GDP terms. Arguably GDP growth rates are a better measure, in which case there's possibly a inverse correlation.

For example China, India and Malaysia have grown quite substantially are not particularly transparent, but they are alike in their resistance to dollarization. On the other hand Ecuador and El Salvador are examples of countries that have fully embraced dollarization with less than great outcomes. There are examples in the middle as well, but there is not a clear trend that it's necessarily a change for the better of the country and it's citizens.

To me it seems like a continuation of the IMF's dollarization as described by Joseph Stiglitz in 'Globalization and its discontents', in terms of mechanisms and effects on recipient countries. From this perspective it's less like transferring power from kleptocrats to the people, and more like choosing kleptocrats that are offering a better deal.

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eastboundDec 2023

How is that different than the IMF pumping cash in 1998 into the Russia economy, only so that private companies take the profits and create oligarchs and various lords, who then emigrated to the French Riviera with women who became widows there, empoverishing the Russian land even further, as shows by the economist Joseph Stieglitz in his book Globalization and its Discontents?

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