Comments:
(From the Publisher)

Despite massive investment of money and research aimed at ameliorating third-world poverty, the development strategies of the international financial institutions over the past few decades have been a profound failure. Under the tutelage of the World Bank, developing countries have experienced lower growth and rising inequality compared to previous periods. In Beyond the World Bank Agenda, Howard Stein argues that the controversial institution is plagued by a myopic, neoclassical mindset that wrongly focuses on individual rationality and downplays the social and political contexts that can either facilitate or impede development.

Drawing on the examples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and transitional European economies, this revolutionary volume proposes an alternative vision of institutional development with chapter-length applications to finance, state formation, and health care to provide a holistic, contextualized solution to the problems of developing nations.Beyond the World Bank Agendal be essential reading for anyone concerned with forging a new strategy for sustainable development.

Comments:
(From the Publisher)

This book argues that the current financial turmoil signals a crisis in globalisation that will directly challenge the free market economic model.

Graham Turner shows that the housing bubbles in the West were deliberately created to mask the damage inflicted by companies shifting production abroad in an attempt to boost profits. As these bubbles burst, economic growth in many developed countries will inevitably tumble. The Japanese crisis of the 1990s shows that banks and governments may struggle to contain the fallout. The problem has not been limited to the US, UK and Europe: housing bubbles have become endemic across wide swathes of emerging market economies. As the West slides, these countries will see an implosion of their credit bubbles too, shaking their faith in the free market.

Turner is an experienced and successful economic forecaster, whose opinions are sought by large international banks and top financial journalists. Drawing from his first hand experience of the Japanese property crash of the 1990s, he presents his analysis in a clear and persuasive style, showing that the end of housing market growth spells disaster for neoliberal globalisation.