Globalization and Inequality
Author: Elhanan Helpman – Harvard
Globalization is not the primary cause of rising inequality. This may come as a surprise. Inequality within nations has risen steadily in recent decades, at a time when countries around the world have eased restrictions on the movement of goods, capital, and labor. Many assume a causal relationship, which has motivated opposition to policies that promote freer trade. Elhanan Helpman shows, however, in this timely study that this assumption about the effects of globalization is more myth than fact.
Globalization is simultaneously heralded as the engine of economic progress and maligned as a prime cause of job loss and inequality. In this wonderfully readable book that brings some sanity to this debate, Elhanan Helpman summarizes and extends what we have learned from decades of economic research. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding how our economy is changing and how we can hope to benefit from globalization without suffering some of its nasty side effects.
Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Republic of Beliefs – A New Approach to Law and Economics
Author: Kaushik Basu – Cornell University
In The Republic of Beliefs, Kaushik Basu, one of the world’s leading economists, argues that the traditional economic analysis of the law has significant flaws and has failed to answer certain critical questions satisfactorily. Why are good laws drafted but never implemented? When laws are unenforced, is it a failure of the law or the enforcers? And, most important, considering that laws are simply words on paper, why are they effective? Basu offers a provocative alternative to how the relationship between economics and real-world law enforcement should be understood.
Dance of the Trillions: Developing Countries and Global Finance
Author: David Lubin – Chatham House
David Lubin tells the story of what makes money flow from high-income countries to lower-income ones; what makes it flow out again; and how developing countries have sought protection against the volatility of international capital flows. Dance of the Trillions traces an arc from the 1970s, when developing countries first gained access to international financial markets, to the present day. Underlying this story is a discussion of how the relationship between developing countries and global finance appears to be moving from one governed by the ‘Washington Consensus’ to one more likely to be shaped by Beijing.
Dance of the Trillions is an insightful and beautifully written panoramic narrative of international finance in the last hundred years. It describes vividly how international capital flows have played a major role in shaping the fortunes of developing countries.
Hélène Rey, London Business School/em>
Crashed – How a decade of financial crises changed the world<
Author: Adam Tooze – Columbia University
In September 2008 President George Bush could still describe the financial crisis as an incident local to Wall Street. In fact it was a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance. In the United States and Europe, it caused a fundamental reconsideration of capitalist democracy, eventually leading to the war in the Ukraine, the chaos of Greece, Brexit, and Trump.
Crashed is an essential read to understand the state of the world, and a troubling read, thinking ahead to the next ten years.
Diane Coyle, University of Cambridge
