AU Professor and Author of New Book, Development Redefined, Available to Comment on IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 7, 2008)-World leaders and private financiers descend upon Washington, D.C. this week to discuss the plight of the world's poor at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Robin Broad, co-author of Development Redefined: How the Market Met its Match and expert on globalization and development at AU's School of International Service, says there are alternatives to the free-market approaches used for decades by the World Bank to try to catalyze "development."

(Media-Newswire.com) - WASHINGTON, D.C. ( Oct. 7, 2008 )—World leaders and private financiers descend upon Washington, D.C. this week to discuss the plight of the world’s poor at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Robin Broad, co-author of Development Redefined: How the Market Met its Match and expert on globalization and development at AU’s School of International Service, says there are alternatives to the free-market approaches used for decades by the World Bank to try to catalyze “development.”

“People-based alternatives to the corporate-led globalization of the World Bank are the only way to improve the lives of the world’s poor,” said Broad. “The Bank owes an apology to the millions who have received bad loans and bad advice because of an over-reliance on free-markets that has only deepened poverty and inequality and harmed the environment.”

Broad and her co-author—husband John Cavanagh, who directs the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. —will be attending the meetings and will be available to comment throughout the week and this coming weekend.

Development Redefined: How the Market Met its Match, which is being released this week by Paradigm Publishers, takes readers on a journey through the rise and fall of the one-size-fits-all model of development that richer nations began imposing on poorer ones three decades ago. That model—called the “Washington Consensus” by its backers and “neoliberalism” or “market fundamentalism” by its critics—placed enormous power in markets to solve the problems of the poor.

Robin Broad, a former U.S. Treasury economist, is a professor of international development at the School of International Service at American University. John Cavanagh directs the Institute for Policy Studies. This husband and wife team traveled from Geneva to the rural Philippines to Washington D.C., to write Development Redefined: How the Market Met its Match as well as their award-winning Plundering Paradise: The Struggle for the Environment in the Philippines.

AU’s School of International Service was founded as a result of Dwight Eisenhower’s observation in 1956 that the United States needed to increase its capacity to train young men and women to “wage peace” around the world. Since its founding in 1957, SIS has offered a multidisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes the operative word in the school’s name—service. This overriding belief fuels the school’s goal to educate individuals whose personal and societal principles offer the promise of success in an increasingly interconnected and complex world. Today, SIS serves more than 2,500 students from every state and more than 100 countries.
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Contact: Jon Hussey Date: 10/07/2008
Phone: ( 202 ) 885-5935