Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #216961 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Geography professor Peet explores the institutional histories of the three pillars of the global financial order, from their circumscribed beginnings at the post-war Bretton Woods Conference to their increasingly central role in many Third World economies in this detailed critique. As the IMF and World Bank condition their loans on far-reaching and draconian "structural adjustment" programs, and the WTO acts as an unelected, super-government passing judgment on environmental regulations, labor standards and other supposed impediments to trade, Peet argues, these undemocratic organizations assert unprecedented levels of control over a wider and wider segment of the world's population. While maintaining a Keynesian regulatory role over the world economy, he contends, these institutions have become standard-bearers for the neoliberal ideology favored by the "Washington-Wall Street Alliance," imposing on poor countries a regimen of free trade, government austerity, export-led development and deregulation and privatization of the economy. Such policies, he says, although convenient for international corporations and investors, have been disastrous for the people of these countries, resulting in slow growth, environmental devastation, and rising poverty and inequality. Peet is an impassioned left-wing opponent of these policies, but his thoroughly researched and analytically incisive treatment ably sums up a critique that is growing in influence among activists and mainstream economists alike. Academically sophisticated but accessible to laypeople (although his discussion of neoliberal rhetoric occasionally lapses into wholly unnecessary Foucauldian jargon about "restrictive discursive spaces"), Peet's account provides real intellectual heft to back up the placards of anti-globalization protestors.
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Review
"Seattle, Genoa and Prague have etched the centrality of the IMF, the IBRD and the WTO into our consciousness . This book charts the contours and the reach of these global regulatory institutions and how they serve as a fortress for the prevailing neoliberal theory of globalization."--Michael Watts, Director, Institute of International Studies, University of California"This is a great book."--David Harvey, City University of New York". . . provides an important history lesson of how the IMF, World Bank, and WTO were twisted from their original mandates to serve the interests of corporate globalization."--John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies

Review
"Seattle, Genoa and Prague have etched the centrality of the IMF, the IBRD and the WTO into our consciousness . This book charts the contours and the reach of these global regulatory institutions and how they serve as a fortress for the prevailing neoliberal theory of globalization."--Michael Watts, Director, Institute of International Studies, University of California
"This is a great book."--David Harvey, City University of New York
". . . provides an important history lesson of how the IMF, World Bank, and WTO were twisted from their original mandates to serve the interests of corporate globalization."--John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies

Customer Reviews

Whose Hitler?
In a word, if you like living in a sovereign nation, then write your Congressional representive, your Senators, and have the US removed from these organizations. There is a real bad element here. World domination bad.

good class action
This is what university work should be like: a professor leading a group of studnets in common action and collectieley publishing their work. Well done. Lots of good points which the unholy trinity should answer in some forum or other. All three organs are dominated by the US as Stiglitz, Bellamy and others have pointed out. Whether US hegemony is a good or bad thing is a different question.
I felt the book could have done without Foucault, who has little to contribute on the parameters of discourse or much else. The fact is the budgets of these institutions dwarf all others and it makes a welcome change to see an articulate counter point of view, especially as it was a grassroots student project. Definitely worth a read.

good overview of the IMF, World Bank & WTO
Any one looking for a good, critical overview of the history of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization--the major institutions of international economic governance, the institutional guardians and promoters of neoliberal globalization--should check this book out. It reviews the history of these three organizations in depth. Most analyses of these organizations that I've seen just look at their current policies and critique them. Peet (and the junior student authors who assisted him) add a great deal of historical depth to this, looking at the conditions under which the unhol trinity were founded at the end of World War II, how their missions have changed over time, and the power structures in which these organizations are embedded and part of. He looks at how the changing ways the US government has used these organizations to advance the interests of the US political-economic elite (what Peet et al. call the Washington-Wall Street Alliance) on the world stage. This book also provides a progressive critique of their impact, although other sources probably go into deeper depth on that score. Since Peet is a social scientist, he doesn't just put the problem down to bad intentions, but down to bad social structures--a refreshing change from some of the simple-minded demonization of the elite you can find in some quarters. Peet particularly analyzes how the role of people's beliefs in shaping their actions within these institutions. In some ways, this is the weakest part of the book. He tries to use an analysis of discourse a la Foucault to explain the working of these organizations, explaining how the hegemony of neoclassical economics shuts out any debates of alternatives. While this is valuable, discourse analysis along can not bear the full weight of analyzing the problems with the unholy trinity--you need some sort of political-economic analysis in the lines of world-systems theory or something to make full sense of these organizations. Indeed, Peet lays out his Foucauldian analysis in the first chapter--and then those ideas barely show up again. Honestly, I would suggest anyone who's not an academic just skip the first chapter and read the rest of the book. You won't miss much. After the first chapter though, the book provides a solid overview of the history of the IMF, World Bank and WTO--and through them much of the process of globalization.