This publication sets out an empirical analysis of the impact of economic liberalisation and globalisation on inequality, poverty and development, including recent trends in economic growth, income distribution and global inequalities, and the comparative experiences of countries that have pursued different economic policies.
U.S. national security policy is at a critically important crossroads. The Bush Doctrine of unilateralism, pre-emptive war, and the imposition of democracy by force has proven disastrous. The United States now finds itself vilified abroad, weakened at home, and bogged down in a seemingly endless and unwinnable war. In To Lead the World, Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro bring together eleven of America's most esteemed writers and thinkers to offer concrete, historically grounded suggestions for how America can regain its standing in the world and use its power more wisely than it has during the Bush years. Best-selling authors such as David Kennedy, Niall Ferguson, Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, and Samantha Power address such issues as how the US can regain its respect in the world, respond to the biggest threats now facing the country, identify reasonable foreign policy goals, manage the growing debt burden, achieve greater national security, and successfully engage a host of other problems left unsolved and in many cases exacerbated by the Bush Doctrine. Representing a wide range of perspectives, the writers gathered here place the current foreign-policy predicament firmly in the larger context of American and world history and draw upon realistic appraisals of both the strengths and the limits of American power. They argue persuasively that the kind of leadership that made the United States a great--and greatly admired--nation in the past can be revitalized to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Written by prize-winning authors and filled with level-headed, far-sighted, and achievable recommendations, To Lead the World will serve as a primary source of political wisdom in the post-Bush era and will add immeasurably to the policy debates surrounding the 2008 presidential election.
Across the world, cities are being reshaped in myriad ways by neoliberal forms of globalization, a process of urban restructuring with significant implications for educational policy and practices. The chapters in this collection speak to two complementary but analytically distinguishable aspects of the interplay between education, globalization, cities, and neoliberalism. The first aspect relates to the macro relationships between these powerful global forces on the one hand, and cities and their schools on the other. In particular the book considers the stratifying dynamics that exacerbate already existing inequalities related to race, ethnicity, language, class, and gender—inequalities entailing differential access to the city’s various resources. The second aspect deals with the cultural politics, and logics, of these changes in the city. This recognises that globalization is not simply imposed on the city, but rather becomes insinuated into its fabric through the actions and the agency of local actors and social movements. Against this backdrop, the chapters document how the educational politics of urban contexts in the United States, India, Canada, South Africa and Brazil should be understood as sites in which neoliberal forms of globalization are localised, reproduced, and potentially contested. This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.
As the Eurozone faces an uncertain future and Obama struggles to demonstrate that America still has a superpower status, this book challenges the widespread perception that Brazil, Russia, India and China are becoming global economic and political powers, instead forecasting a decline rooted in excessive inequality and insufficient innovation.
The rapid evolution of events in the European, Middle Eastern, and North African spheres has reinvigorated the debate on Euro-Mediterranean relations. Since 1995 these relations have operated under the auspices of the Barcelona Process, which laid the foundations for three initiatives that define European policy towards neighbouring states: the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the European Neighbourhood Policy, and the Union for the Mediterranean. This book scrutinises these initiatives through a socioeconomic prism. Adam Yousef reviews how appropriate these initiatives have been in promoting socioeconomic development in North African states, projects the long-term implications of these policies and investigates whether they can reduce the gap in social outcomes across the Mediterranean Basin over time. Using Morocco as a case study, this book employs a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative data as well as economic theory. It reveals not only that the Barcelona Process has had a limited impact on promoting social outcomes in Morocco, but crucially that it is also unlikely to do so in the future, suggesting a new approach may be required.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The role of sport in development initiatives has grown dramatically over the last five years, now finding a place in the UN's millennium development goals. In Sport and Development for Peace, Simon Darnell outlines the most recent sociological research on the role of sport in development initiatives. The book analyses the relationship between sport and international development and looks at what this reveals about socio-political economy. It addresses a gap in the literature by focusing on issues of politics, power and culture, particularly looking at volunteer experience, mega-sporting events and sporting celebrity in the context of development. Darnell questions the belief that sport can offer a 'solution' to enduring development issues. Drawing on the latest empirical research, the book is a thorough and timely analysis of the social and political implications of tying sport to development.
Today’s foreign aid programs are small-scale because of the widespread belief that they are ineffective. This could be an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: small scale virtually guarantees ineffectiveness. However, the pervasive contemporary pessimism regarding global economic inequality is most likely unfounded. The research described in this book suggests that a properly designed and sufficiently massive economic development assistance project—a Global Marshall Plan—could tremendously reduce the economic gap between the richest and poorest nations within a 50-year planning period. Enrichment of the poor nations would not entail impoverishment of the rich nations. The actual cost of the GMP program to the populations of the rich nations would be a very slight and virtually unnoticeable reduction in the rate of growth of their living standards. The model incorporates features suggested by the skeptical literature on foreign aid, and it is shown that if certain key parameter values are sufficiently adverse, the GMP would indeed be ineffective. However, extensive sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the optimistic benchmark results are robust against wide variations in the numerical values of most model parameters. The fundamental policy implication of this research is that only an actual real-world experiment with a Global Marshall Plan could reliably determine whether or not it would be successful.
The 1944 Bretton Woods conference created new institutions for international economic governance. Though flawed, the system led to a golden age in postwar reconstruction, sustained economic growth, job creation, and postcolonial development. Yet financial liberalization since the 1970s has involved deregulation and globalization, which have exacerbated instability, rather than sustained growth. In addition, the failure of Bretton Woods to provide a reserve currency enabled the dollar to fill the void, which has contributed to periodic, massive U.S. trade deficits. Our latest global financial crisis, in which all these weaknesses played a part, underscores how urgently we must reform the international financial system. Prepared for the G24 research program, a consortium of developing countries focused on financial issues, this volume argues that such reforms must be developmental. Chapters review historical trends in global liquidity, financial flows to emerging markets, and the food crisis, identifying the systemic flaws that contributed to the recent downturn. They challenge the effectiveness of recent policy and suggest criteria for regulatory reform, keeping in mind the different circumstances, capacities, and capabilities of various economies. Essays follow ongoing revisions in international banking standards, the improved management of international capital flows, the critical role of the World Trade Organization in liberalizing and globalizing financial services, and the need for international tax cooperation. They also propose new global banking and reserve currency arrangements.
East Asia is widely regarded as the main "winner" in contemporary globalization, unscathed by the economic crisis of 2008, with its leading new industrializing nations and emerging economies. While 20th-century globalization was mainly led by the West, the 21st century is ushering in different dynamics. The re-emergence of Asia involves alternative visions of the world and different perspectives on globalization. This volume seeks to address these dimensions, turning to local reflexivities, notably in South Korea and China, to explore the key debates in sociology and political economy within East Asia rather than from an outside view.