"He finds in the international development community a close-knit coalition of policy makers who have inserted themselves into the local political process and pushed the Honduran nation-state to conform to international norms and integrate into a transnational structure of governance.

The IMF and the World Bank have integrated a large number of countries into the world economy by requiring governments to open up to global trade, investment, and capital. They have not done this out of pure economic zeal. Politics and their own rules and habits explain much of why they have presented globalization as a solution to challenges they have faced in the world economy.—from the Introduction The greatest success of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has been as globalizers. But at whose cost? Would borrowing countries be better off without the IMF and World Bank? This book takes readers inside these institutions and the governments they work with. Ngaire Woods brilliantly decodes what they do and why they do it, using original research, extensive interviews carried out across many countries and institutions, and scholarship from the fields of economics, law, and politics. The Globalizers focuses on both the political context of IMF and World Bank actions and their impact on the countries in which they intervene. After describing the important debates between U.S. planners and the Allies in the 1944 foundation at Bretton Woods, she analyzes understandings of their missions over the last quarter century. She traces the impact of the Bank and the Fund in the recent economic history of Mexico, of post-Soviet Russia, and in the independent states of Africa. Woods concludes by proposing a range of reforms that would make the World Bank and the IMF more effective, equitable, and just.

There are many textbooks devoted to international trade but few volumes that survey trade theory, policy, and negotiations in a concise, up-to-date manner from an interdisciplinary perspective. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the issues that dominate both academic discourse and the policymaking arena in the field of international trade, bringing to bear the insights of economics, law, and political science. It also stands out by virtue of its emphasis on the development implications of trade, an increasingly useful perspective given the deepening liberalization of developing and emerging market economies and their growing importance in the world economy. The volume examines the full range of trade policy topics that dominate contemporary debates, such as rules of origin, trade in services, competition, public procurement, and trade facilitation, plus emergent controversial topics like trade-related labour standards and environmental issues. It analyses the international trade architecture and the institutional and practical aspects of policymaking and negotiations at the unilateral, multilateral, and regional level, as well as the effects of trade on economic growth, inequality, and poverty. It also explores the sharp increase in the number of preferential trade agreements and their significance for the global trade system. The treatment of each issue is rigorous, yet highly accessible to anyone with a basic background in economics, law, and international political economy.

In an era when trade and currency wars threaten to end a long-standing period of growing trade and capital flows, the economics of international trade, investment and finance have become more important than ever. This three-volume Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the theory and evidence on the causes and consequences of global trade, and the theory and evidence on the economics of international trade, financial and monetary transactions.It provides, first of all, a comprehensive set of entries explaining the key theoretical concepts in international economics as well as the latest empirical and simulation techniques used in the academic literature. In addition, various entries present the history behind — and the controversies surrounding — the core current global trade and monetary institutions, from the World Trade Organization to the European Monetary Union.The three volumes also provide a serious discussion of today's central policy debates, including the impact of globalization on employment, wages and income distribution, the imposition of controls on international financial flows, the effects of tariffs and protectionist policies, fixed versus flexible exchange rate regimes, and the role of the multinational enterprise on global growth, technical change and income distribution, among many others.

Truth without Objectivity provides a critique of the mainstream view of 'meaning'. Kölbel examines the standard solutions to the conflict implicit in this view, demonstrating their inadequacy and developing instead his own relativist theory of truth. The mainstream view of meaning assumes that understanding a sentence's meaning implies knowledge of the conditions required for it to be true. This view is challenged by taste judgements, which have meaning, but seem to be neither true nor false.

For Harry Redner, the phrase "beyond civilization" refers to the new and unprecedented condition the world is now entering‘specifically, the condition commonly known as globalization. Redner approaches globalization from the perspective of history and seeks to interpret it in relation to previous key stages of human development. His account begins with the Axial Age (700 300 BC) and proceeds through Modernity (after AD 1500) to the present global condition. What is globalization doing to civilization? In answering this question, Redner studies the role played by capitalism, the state, science and technology. He aims to show that they have had a catalytic impact on civilization through their reductive effect on society, culture, and individualism. However, Redner is not content to diagnose the ills of civilization; he also suggests how they might be ameliorated by cultural conservation. Above all, it is to the problem of decline in the higher forms of literacy that he addresses himself, for it is on the culture of the book that previous civilizations were founded. This study will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and social and political theorists. Its style makes it accessible also to general readers, interested in civilization past, present, and future.