Books & ideas

Benefits and costs of free trade for less developed countries

Nina Pavcnik — 2009-11-05T10:49:00Z

Trade liberalization seems to have increased growth and income in developing countries over the past thirty years, through lower prices, firm-level efficiency gains and improved access to foreign inputs. However, aggregate gains from free trade are not necessarily equally distributed, so that trade liberalization has important costs for some people.

Karl Polanyi, the Market and Socialism

Arnault Skornicki — 2009-10-22T09:41:22Z

Is society sentenced to endure the law of the market? The publication of a number of essays by economist Karl Polanyi hitherto unpublished in French gives us the opportunity to re-discover democratic socialism as championed by the author of The Great Transformation. His thinking on political power's capacity to organise economic exchanges still applies.

The crisis is more than economics

Martin Albrow & Colin Bradford — 2009-04-01T10:09:55Z

At the London G20 Summit, hosted by Gordon Brown, the leaders of the major new “great powers”, China, India and Brazil, will be prominent. What can be expected from this meeting? The G20 will only fill the vacuum at the centre if it addresses the broader systemic crisis of responsibility and accountability that arises out of the West's worship of the free market.

The World Social Forum Challenge

Geoffrey Pleyers — 2009-01-28T12:18:48Z

The 8^th World Social Forum opened on January 27^th in Belem, Brazil. Geoffrey Pleyers explains the situation of the alter-globalisation movement: in spite of the success of its ideas in the wake of the world economic crisis, the movement is looking for new ways of action.