The Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization - Softcover

Bhagwati, University Professor Senior Fellow In International Economics At The Council On Foreign Relations Jagdish N

9780262523271: The Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262523272 ISBN 13: 9780262523271

Publisher: MIT Press, 2002

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Provocative essays on international trade, with particular focus on U.S. foreign trade policy.

In The Wind of the Hundred Days, a new collection of public policy essays, Jagdish Bhagwati applies his characteristic wit and accessible style to the subject of globalization. Notably, he argues that the true Clinton scandal lay in the administration's mismanagement of globalization―resulting in the paradox of immense domestic policy success combined with dramatic failure on the external front. Bhagwati assigns the bulk of the blame for the East Asian financial and economic crisis―a disaster that prompts him to use as his title the poet Octavio Paz's image of devastation "I met the wind of the hundred days"―to the administration's hasty push for financial liberalization in the region.

The administration, Bhagwati claims, has also mishandled the freeing of trade. The administration-hosted WTO meeting in Seattle ended in chaos and the launch of a new round of multilateral trade negotiations was dashed. Bhagwati shows how the administration's failure to get Congress to renew fast-track authority can be attributed to an unimaginative response to the demands of a growing civil society. In several essays, he shows how free trade and social agendas both could have been pursued successfully if the concerns of human-rights, environmental, cultural, and labor activists had been met through creative programs at appropriate international agencies such as the International Labour Organization instead of the WTO and via trade treaties. Bhagwati also criticizes the claim that "globalization needs a human face," arguing that it already has one. He faults the administration for embracing unsubstantiated anti-globalization rhetoric that has made its own preferred option of pursuing globalization that much more difficult.

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About the Author:

Jagdish N. Bhagwati is University Professor of Economics, Law, and International Relations at Columbia University and former Adviser to the Director General of GATT, Arthur Dunkel. He is the author (with Arvind Panagariya) of Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries.

From Booklist:

Was the Asian financial crisis "President Clinton's real scandal"? Bhagwati, Columbia University professor of economics and political science and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, would argue it was. His second collection of essays, lectures, and book reviews (following A Stream of Windows, 1998) maintains that, in economic terms, the Clinton administration's "admirable domestic policy success" has been matched by "abysmal foreign policy failure." Bhagwati blames the Asian collapse on the Clintonites' demand (influenced by the "Wall Street-Treasury complex") for free capital mobility as an essential element of free trade. He suggests crony capitalism is not a uniquely Asian phenomenon: U.S. cronyism, he argues, produces forced opening of markets to U.S. cultural exports and excessive intellectual property protection. Bhagwati is particularly incensed at the "free trade must be fair trade" argument of anti-WTO demonstrators (and occasionally Clinton); he insists issues such as worker rights and environmental protection should be addressed through appropriate United Nations bodies, not through trade negotiations. A constructive, if controversial, contribution to an important public policy debate. Mary Carroll
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