In Defence of Globalisation by Jagdish Bhagwati

Amazing book. My mom got it for me last week. It is what you call ’undownputtable’. The writer , Prof. Bhagwati is one of the greatest economists in the world and a certainty to win the Nobel prize for economics in the near future. Always an ardent advocate of free market , here he explains globalisation for casual readers like me using a language free of any economic heavy duty jargon , and hits the mark brilliantly.

Here is a review from the magazine economist..



An unusually persuasive reply to popular fallacies about global capitalism

In Defence of Globalisation

By Jagdish Bhagwati

Oxford University Press; 320 pages; $28 and £17.99


ONE thing people in today’s rapidly globalising world economy no longer need, you might think, is another book exploring the implications of the rapid globalisation of the world economy. Publishers have churned them out by the dozen in recent years. Can there really be room for yet another? Certainly—and especially so in the case of this new work from the prolific Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University.

Up to now, anti-globalist works have had too much the upper hand. They heavily outnumber books advocating or celebrating globalisation. Multiply titles by sales, and their preponderance is overwhelming. Also, one cannot say that globalists have had the lead in quality, at least, or even (as you might suppose) in authors’ academic credentials. Many pro-globalisation books are so badly argued, so keen to deploy anecdote not evidence, that they discredit their cause. So far as credentials go, note that anti-globalists would regard Joseph Stiglitz’s bestselling “Globalisation and its Discontents”, published in 2002 (and none too kindly reviewed in The Economist of June 6th that year), as mostly taking their side—and Mr Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner, is an undisputed star in the academic and policy firmaments.

Mr Bhagwati’s new book, “In Defence of Globalisation”, will help to restore the balance—in sales and readers, it is to be hoped, as well as in other ways. Mr Bhagwati has ample reserves of academic eminence: he is a pioneer in trade theory and the author of numerous scholarly works. But what matters more is that he has written an outstandingly effective book—his best popular work to date. Until further notice “In Defence of Globalisation” becomes the standard general-interest reference, the intelligent layman’s handbook, on global economic integration.

It has two particular virtues. The first is that it is free of gimmicks in content and structure. Despite coming late to the discussion, it rightly strives for no big new take on the subject, for no grand, previously overlooked and bogus theme around which to organise the material. Its plan is simple and straightforward.

The core of the book is a series of chapters which look in turn at the charges that anti-globalists make against the international market economy: that globalisation worsens poverty, for instance, that it extends or entrenches the use of child labour, that it worsens the plight of women in developing countries, that it erodes democracy, that it imperils local cultures, that it despoils the environment, and so forth. Each of these claims is then calmly held up to the evidence and shown, as a rule, to be wrong or at any rate dangerously misleading.

Its other great virtue, aside from this refreshingly straightforward approach, is that it takes anti-globalist arguments seriously. More than that, in fact, Mr Bhagwati makes it plain that he shares many of the concerns, and endorses most of the values, that animate the anti-globalist movement. Indeed, if the book has a weakness analytically, it is that Mr Bhagwati is occasionally too generous to his anti-globalist opponents—as when, for instance, he rather uncritically applauds the business-monitoring role that NGOs play in many developing countries. (Sometimes businesses respond to such monitoring, and the possibly ill-advised demands that follow from it, in ways that slow development and therefore hurt the poor.) This posture, on the other hand, makes the book far more persuasive than it would otherwise have been. Mr Bhagwati is as offended by poverty and its indignities as are the anti-globalists. He cannot be accused of complacency. This makes his assault on the anti-globalists’ trade-curbing prescriptions far more powerful.

As you might expect, given the thrust of the author’s previous academic and policy work, Mr Bhagwati regards liberal trade—the principal driver of globalisation—as essential to raising the incomes and improving the longer-term development prospects of the world’s poor. The book is excellent on all the ways in which demands for trade protection, however well intended, lead to bad or unintended consequences that leave the poor worse off. While activist NGOs may have a useful role to play, in Mr Bhagwati’s view, that role certainly does not include campaigning for policies that would lead either directly or indirectly to generalised impediments to trade.

“In Defence of Globalisation” is excellent too in insisting that economic integration, while good, is by itself not good enough, and that a variety of steps needs to be taken to enlarge the benefits flowing to the poor. The book offers many suggestions. Balanced, compelling and thorough in its use of evidence, there is much here to make globalists and anti-globalists alike think again, and perhaps even to narrow the differences between them.

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