De-globalization

Ideas for a New World Economy

Walden Bello

October 2002

Will the world economy be forever more market-oriented and dominated by transnational corporations? This short and trenchant history of the organizations promoting economic globalization - the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and Group of Seven - points to their manifest failings.

Recurrent financial crises, a yawning gulf between developing and industrialized countries, gross inequalities within all countries and mass poverty. Bello reviews these institutions' crisis of legitimacy and examines the major new ideas for reform - the Commission on Global Governance's suggestion of an Economic Security Council; the US Congress's Meltzer Commission proposals; and the ideas of financier, George Soros.

Walden Bello sees these ideas as mere tinkering with marginal policy changes; the world requires a radical shift towards a decentralised, pluralistic system of economic governance allowing countries to follow development strategies appropriate to their needs and circumstances. This 'deglobalization' means radically reducing the powers and roles of the existing TNC-driven WTO and Bretton Woods institutions. And requires the formation of new institutions helping to devolve the greater part of production, trade and economic decisionmaking to national and local level.

ISBN:

1 84277 304 6

You can buy a copy here:

http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=3571

Walden Bello

Senior analyst at Philippine think-tank Focus on the Global South, TNI fellow and Akbayan representative in the Filipino Congress.

Author of more than 14 books, Bello was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 2003 for "... outstanding efforts in educating civil society about the effects of corporate globalisation, and how alternatives to it can be implemented." Bello has been described by the Economist as the man “who popularised a new term: deglobalisation.”

Bello predicted the financial crisis several years prior to the current meltdown and is a globally respected figure within the alternative globalisation movement. Canadian author Naomi Klein called him the "world's leading no-nonsense revolutionary."