How to manage the global economy - and, more fundamentally, whether humanity wishes it to go in an ever more market-oriented, transnational corporation-dominated, and capital-footloose direction - is the most important international question of our time. In this short and trenchant history of those bodies -- the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and Group of Seven -- which have promoted this economic globalization, Walden Bello: * Points to their manifest failings; * Examines the major new ideas put forward for reforming the management of the world economy; * Argues for a much more fundamental shift towards a decentralized, pluralistic system of global economic governance allowing countries to follow development strategies sensitive to their own values and particular mix of constraints and opportunities.

Author Biography

Walden Bello is the founding Director of Focus on the Global South, a policy research institute based in Bangkok, Thailand. Prior to that, he was Executive Director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in Oakland, California. Educated at Princeton University where he did his doctorate in Sociology in 1975, he subsequently taught at the University of California, Berkeley where he was a research associate with the Center for South East Asian Studies. A renowned campaigner for international justice and development and one of the leading independent critics in the South of current global economic arrangements, he is the author of numerous books, including: A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand (with Shea Cunningham and Li Kheng Poh) (1999) Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty (with Shea Cunningham) (1994) People and Power in the Pacific: The Struggle for the Post-Cold War Order (1992) Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (with Stephanie Rosenfeld) (1991) Brave New Third World? Strategies for Survival in the Global Economy (1990) Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines (1982).