The Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalization and Resistance
Third World activist and scholar Walden Bello is one of the most astute and ardent critics of the international financial institutions. His new collection of essays, The Future in the Balance, tells the truth about the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, and their grip on the Third World.
Rarely have the true causes of the financial crisis -- the American, European, and Japanese financial institutions that advocated free market economies based on the principles of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization -- been so clearly and eloquently spelled out. The essays in The Future in the Balance show how a world has been created where the poor are left to meet their needs in a skyrocketing free market, and protectionism and cronyism exists for banks and corporations. Bello shatters the myths of development as prescribed by these institutions and offers the possibility of another world based on fairness and justice.
By Walden Bello
Edited with a preface by Anuradha Mittal
ISBN 0-935028-84-6
May 2001
$13.95, paperback
288 pages, indexed
"Clear analysis and impressive scholarship have made Bello one of Asia's key progressive thinkers. Insistence on people-centered development grounded in ecological sustainability sets him apart from the elite consensus in Asia."
-- The New Internationalist
"Among the expanding constellation of activists, academics, and thinkers who believe that mainstream economics... does not have an answer to people's needs, Walden Bello is a prominent star."
-- The Bangkok Post
A prolific writer, Walden Bello is author, co-author, or editor of 11 books and over 800 articles on Asian, Korean, and Philippine issues. He is the executive director of one of the leading centers against corporate-driven globalization, Focus on the Global South, a research, analysis, and advocacy institute based in Bangkok, Thailand, that is. The national chairman of Akbayan, the Philippine political party, Bello has served as executive director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy.
Table of Contents
Preface by Anuradha Mittal
Introduction
Part I: The Bretton Woods System in Crisis
1. The Iron Cage: The WTO, the Bretton Woods Institutions, and the South
2. Why Reform of the WTO is the Wrong Agenda
3. Jurassic Fund: Should Developing Countries Push to Decommission the IMF?
4. Meltzer Report Builds the Case for Abolition of Bretton Woods Twins but Hesitates
Part II. Speculative Capital and the Asian Financial Crisis
5. Asian Financial Crisis: The Movie
6. Fast Track Capitalism, Geoeconomic Competition, and the Sustainable Development Challenge
7. East Asia: On the Eve of the Great Transformation?
8. Notes on the Ascendancy and Regulation of Global Finance
9. Breaking with the Faith
10. Power, Timidity, and Irresponsibility in Global Finance
Part III: The US: Globalization, Geopolitics, and Unilateralism
11. US Economic Expansion: Boon or Bane for Asia?
12. The Shrimp-Turtle Controversy and the Rise of Green Unilateralism
13. Dangerous Liaisons: Progressives, the Right, and the Anti-China Trade Campaign
14. Why Land Reform is No Longer Possible without Revolution
15. Washington and the Demise of the Third Wave of Democratization
Part IV: The Struggle for the Future
16. Prague 2000: Toward a De-globalized World
17. Global Civil Society: Promise and Pitfalls
18. 2000: The Year of Global Protest Against Globalization
19. Washington's Political Transition Threatens Bretton Woods Twins
20. When Davos Meets Porto Alegre: A Memoir