Fair Trade For All

I'm looking forward to reading the soon-to-be-published book from Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton. For now, I have to be content with reading reviews such as this:

This "Washington Consensus" has been dominant since the late 1970s. Unfortunately, as Stiglitz dryly points out, "it is difficult to identify the evidentiary source of the bullishness for unqualified trade liberalisation". This is an economist's way of saying that the emperor has no clothes; that trade liberalisation has become a dogma that does not deliver. Indeed, poor countries which have grown rich have done so by doing the opposite of what the neoliberals told them to. "To date," Stiglitz writes, "not one successful developing country has pursued a purely free market approach to development."

Forcing poor countries to open their markets, in fact, often simply entrenches poverty and inequality. What is needed, says Stiglitz, is a trading system which focuses on poverty-reduction and fairness.

He and Charlton lay out a number of detailed ideas, including a proposal under which all WTO members would have to provide unfettered market access for countries smaller and poorer than them; a commitment by developed countries to eliminate agricultural subsidies; the integration of environment and human-rights measures into trade agreements; and the removal of global agreements which favour the rich, like those on patents and intellectual property.

In a previous post, I highlighted the need to bring people from the environmental and social justice movements into some of these trade discussions. Hopefully, the IMF/World Bank/WTO are realizing that they could use a dose of new ideas.