As the world economy slides into the worst recession since the 1930s, there is fear that hard times will ignite a backlash against free trade policies and globalization more generally. This book explores the political and economic institutional foundations of the bargain of embedded liberalism and the ways domestic institutions shape how governments redistribute the risks and benefits of economic globalization. The author identifies the Anglo-American democracies, because of their majoritarian polities combined with decentralized, competitive economies, as uniquely vulnerable to the contemporary challenges of globalization and the most susceptible to a backlash against it.

As the world economy slides into the worst recession since the 1930s, there is fear that hard times will ignite a backlash against free trade policies and globalization more generally. This book explores the political and economic institutional foundations of the bargain of embedded liberalism and the ways domestic institutions shape how governments redistribute the risks and benefits of economic globalization. The author identifies the Anglo-American democracies, because of their majoritarian polities combined with decentralized, competitive economies, as uniquely vulnerable to the contemporary challenges of globalization and the most susceptible to a backlash against it.

As the world economy slides into the worst recession since the 1930s, there is fear that hard times will ignite a backlash against free trade policies and globalization more generally. This book explores the political and economic institutional foundations of the bargain of embedded liberalism and the ways domestic institutions shape how governments redistribute the risks and benefits of economic globalization. The author identifies the Anglo-American democracies, because of their majoritarian polities combined with decentralized, competitive economies, as uniquely vulnerable to the contemporary challenges of globalization and the most susceptible to a backlash against it.

Examines the possibilities of global governance in the wake of the challenges of globalization.

The Globalization of Liberalism demonstrates that liberalism is more deeply embedded in the structure of modern international political and economic order than is usually realised, and that at present there is a contested process of the 'globalization of liberalism'. As well as exploring liberalism's usefulness for understanding how international relations work, the contributors offer critical perspectives on the liberal structure of modern international society and places international liberalism into a global context by examining responses to liberalism in China, India and the Middle East.

For a century, economists have driven forward the cause of globalization in financial institutions, labour markets, and trade. Yet there have been consistent warning signs that a global economy and free trade might not always be advantageous. Where are the pressure points? What could be done about them? Dani Rodrik examines the back-story from its seventeenth-century origins through the milestones of the gold standard, the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the Washington Consensus, to the present day. Although economic globalization has enabled unprecedented levels of prosperity in advanced countries and has been a boon to hundreds of millions of poor workers in China and elsewhere in Asia, it is a concept that rests on shaky pillars, he contends. Its long-term sustainability is not a given. The heart of Rodrik’s argument is a fundamental 'trilemma': that we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination, and economic globalization. Give too much power to governments, and you have protectionism. Give markets too much freedom, and you have an unstable world economy with little social and political support from those it is supposed to help. Rodrik argues for smart globalization, not maximum globalization.

This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.