One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 278 pages
• Published by: Princeton University Press September 24, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0691129517
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0691129518
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 13.6 ounces

Product Review
" Rodrik's book is one of the best and describing the current state of play." -- Daniel Drezner, Danieldrezner.com

"Rodrik's book hits many of the right buttons." -- Mario Pisani, New Statesman

Product Review
Rodrik packs a great deal into his 260 lucid, cogent pages. Orthodoxies always need serious criticism. Rodrik has supplied it. He has no simple, single recipe for remedying deficient growth--just the eminently sensible advice that there is none--there are many.
(Peter Sinclair Times Higher Education )

Rodrik's book hits many of the right buttons. He has put together a collection of essays of sufficient breadth to engage both the technical observer and the casual reader. His treatment of the subject will come as a bitter pill to both the anti-globalisation movement and the developmentariat, that international coterie of practitioners and commentators working on development issues.
(Mario Pisani New Statesman )

Rodrik is known for rigorous analysis that challenges the conventional wisdom, and this book does not disappoint. Economic growth is a very important goal, Rodrik argues, but the evidence indicates that there is no single recipe for growth.
(M. Veseth Choice )

Dani Rodrik, a Harvard academic usually associated with the active-government side, has written an intriguing book, One Economics, Many Recipes. He argues that economists who agree who agree in general about where countries should be going can conduct open and honest--and technical rather than ideological--debates about how to get there.
(Alan Beattie Financial Times )

Rodrik serves as an important, moderating voice in the globalization debate and this book proves no exception.
(Sarah Cleeland Knight Democracy and Society )

This book is certainly among the best of the many works on development economics recently published. . . . One Economics, Many Recipes is also a model of how applied economics should be done.
(John Kay Prospect Magazine )

The Harvard development economist Rodrik here collects a several of his recent papers into a coherent book. . . . In short, [One Economics, Many Recipes] is a critical response to the international 'consensus' approach to economic policymaking, with its implicit assumption that one set of policies is suitable in all, or at least in most, countries. Rodrik has become known for emphasizing the importance of institutions, but he here makes clear that appropriate policies are also important and that effective institutions can take many forms.
(Richard Cooper Foreign Affairs )

Reader Reviews
This is a terrific book. It begins with a good and troubling question: If economists are so smart, why have the most prominent success stories in economic development in recent decades been in countries (China, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) that ignored our advice? Rodrik's answer is that the advice - mainly Washington Consensus and then its follow-ons - was not so much wrong as a) premature and b) insufficiently flexible. His analysis of recent experience suggests that there are many ways to get growth started in a stagnant economy, and that it takes a very specific, informed, and open-minded local analysis - what he terms "growth diagnostics" - to determine what exactly are the binding constraints in each setting. Furthermore, policies that address those constraints must be politically viable, and that may mean tailoring them so that they create better incentives at the margin without destroying or transferring existing rents. Once economic growth has started, THEN some of the more standard policy prescriptions, introduced carefully and gradually, may be appropriate and even necessary in order to make growth sustainable. Thus, for example, Rodrik argues that both China and India are moving now in more orthodox policy directions, and appropriately so, but that both relied on quite unorthodox measures to make their initial way out of stagnation. There are many other issues addressed, including the importance of political arrangements that allow local needs and preferences to be expressed and the case for international trade policies that allow for diversity in national institutional arrangements. The book closes with a detailed and (to me) quite persuasive critique of the focus of the WTO on increasing trade for the sake of trade rather than considering more carefully which changes in trade policy actually make a difference in the lives of the world's poor. His analysis of the Doha Round suggests that, contrary to the received wisdom, a general worldwide liberalization of agricultural markets and removal of developed country subsidies would lead to only small reductions in poverty, and in fact would likely harm many poor consumers in many countries. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in globalization and development. It is extremely well written, though some sections may be slow going for non-economists. The overall analysis should be quite readable and thought-provoking for the general reader wishing to get a fresh perspective on these important issues.