Nobel Prize winner Stiglitz focuses on policies that truly work and offers fresh, new thinking about the questions that shape the globalization debate.

This powerful, unsettling book gives us a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of global financial institutions by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. When it was first published, this national bestseller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank. Particularly concerned with the plight of the developing nations, he became increasingly disillusioned as he saw the International Monetary Fund and other major institutions put the interests of Wall Street and the financial community ahead of the poorer nations. Those seeking to understand why globalization has engendered the hostility of protesters in Seattle and Genoa will find the reasons here. While this book includes no simple formula on how to make globalization work, Stiglitz provides a reform agenda that will provoke debate for years to come. Rarely do we get such an insider's analysis of the major institutions of globalization as in this penetrating book. With a new foreword for this paperback edition.

A powerful case for the global market economy The debate on globalization has reached a level of intensity that inhibits comprehension and obscures the issues. In this book a highly distinguished international economist scrupulously explains how globalization works as a concept and how it operates in reality. Martin Wolf confronts the charges against globalization, delivers a devastating critique of each, and offers a realistic scenario for economic internationalism in the future. Wolf begins by outlining the history of the global economy in the twentieth century and explaining the mechanics of world trade. He dissects the agenda of globalization’s critics, and rebuts the arguments that it undermines sovereignty, weakens democracy, intensifies inequality, privileges the multinational corporation, and devastates the environment. The author persuasively defends the principles of international economic integration, arguing that the biggest obstacle to global economic progress has been the failure not of the market but of politics and government, in rich countries as well as poor. He examines the threat that terrorism poses and maps the way to a global market economy that can work for everyone.

An incisive look at the global economic crisis, our flawed response, and the implications for the world’s future prosperity. The Great Recession, as it has come to be called, has impacted more people worldwide than any crisis since the Great Depression. Flawed government policy and unscrupulous personal and corporate behavior in the United States created the current financial meltdown, which was exported across the globe with devastating consequences. The crisis has sparked an essential debate about America’s economic missteps, the soundness of this country’s economy, and even the appropriate shape of a capitalist system. Few are more qualified to comment during this turbulent time than Joseph E. Stiglitz. Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Stiglitz is “an insanely great economist, in ways you can’t really appreciate unless you’re deep into the field” (Paul Krugman, New York Times). In Freefall, Stiglitz traces the origins of the Great Recession, eschewing easy answers and demolishing the contention that America needs more billion-dollar bailouts and free passes to those “too big to fail,” while also outlining the alternatives and revealing that even now there are choices ahead that can make a difference. The system is broken, and we can only fix it by examining the underlying theories that have led us into this new “bubble capitalism.” Ranging across a host of topics that bear on the crisis, Stiglitz argues convincingly for a restoration of the balance between government and markets. America as a nation faces huge challenges—in health care, energy, the environment, education, and manufacturing—and Stiglitz penetratingly addresses each in light of the newly emerging global economic order. An ongoing war of ideas over the most effective type of capitalist system, as well as a rebalancing of global economic power, is shaping that order. The battle may finally give the lie to theories of a “rational” market or to the view that America’s global economic dominance is inevitable and unassailable. For anyone watching with indignation while a reckless Wall Street destroyed homes, educations, and jobs; while the government took half-steps hoping for a “just-enough” recovery; and while bankers fell all over themselves claiming not to have seen what was coming, then sought government bailouts while resisting regulation that would make future crises less likely, Freefall offers a clear accounting of why so many Americans feel disillusioned today and how we can realize a prosperous economy and a moral society for the future.

This brilliantly original book dismantles the underlying assumptions that drive the decisions made by companies and governments throughout the world, to show that our shared narrative of the global economy is deeply flawed. If left unexamined, they will lead corporations and countries astray, with dire consequences for us all. For the past fifty years or so, the global economy has been run on three big assumptions: that globalization will continue to spread, that trade is the engine of growth and development, and that economic power is moving from the West to the East. More recently, it has also been taken as a given that our interconnectedness—both physical and digital—will increase without limit. But what if all these ideas are wrong? What if everything is about to change? What if it has already begun to change but we just haven't noticed? Increased automation, the advent of additive manufacturing (3D printing, for example), and changes in shipping and environmental pressures, among other factors, are coming together to create a fast-changing global economic landscape in which the rules are being rewritten—at once a challenge and an opportunity for companies and countries alike.

"Making Sweatshops reveals the inexorable movement towards an open trading system, the shifting alignments of actors pushing for or opposing openness, and, most centrally, how trade policy promotes the globalization of apparel production, filling a gap in our understanding of these dynamics."—Richard P. Appelbaum, coauthor of Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry "A detailed examination of the role that trade policy plays in the process of globalization. Rosen provides a meticulous historical analysis of the textile/apparel industry, one of the world's most globalized industries and one of its most hot-button issues."—Stephen Cullenberg, coauthor of Transition and Development in India "Rosen shows how politics have always shaped the trade agenda from beginning to end, and she presents a most compelling case that if trade and the global economy are to foster justice and equality for the people of our world, we will need to rewrite the existing rules of global trade."—Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee "This book delves deep into the industry's trade journals, congressional testimony, newspaper accounts, and economic and political scholarship of the last fifty-five years to tell the story of U.S. trade policy and the decline of labor standards in the apparel industry. This patient and voluminous examination systematically reveals, for the first time, how the U.S. sacrificed its apparel workers on the altar, first of the anti-Communist crusade, and then of free trade ideology."—Robert J.S. Ross, PhD, Professor of Sociology and Director, International Studies Stream, Clark University "Making Sweatshops is, in part, a history of the apparel and textile industries in the U.S. and the world. But it is much more than that. It is also about power and globalization. Rosen explains how the former shapes the latter, and how workers around the world suffer because of it. Activists, policy makers, consumers--anyone interested in understanding why sweatshops exist--should read this book."—Bruce Raynor, President, Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (Unite) "Rosen convincingly demonstrates that it is the transnational corporations rather than the consumers, and certainly rather than the workers, who benefit from trade liberalization, whose rules the lobbyists for these very coporations more or less write for supine politicians. This is a book in the great tradition of solid scholarship allied with deep commitment to the cause of global economic justice."—Leslie Sklair, author of Globalization: Capitalism and its Alternatives

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.