Dani Rodrik is professor of international political economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was the recipient of the inaugural Albert O. Hirschman Prize from the Social Sciences Research Council, and is the author of Making Openness Work: The New Global Economy and the Developing Countries and Has Globalization Gone Too Far?
In One Economics, Many Recipes, leading economist Dani Rodrik argues that neither globalizers nor antiglobalizers have got it right. While economic globalization can be a boon for countries that are trying to dig out of poverty, success usually requires following policies that are tailored to local economic and political realities rather than obeying the dictates of the international globalization establishment. A definitive statement of Rodrik's original and influential perspective on economic growth and globalization, One Economics, Many Recipes shows how successful countries craft their own unique strategies--and what other countries can learn from them.
To most proglobalizers, globalization is a source of economic salvation for developing nations, and to fully benefit from it nations must follow a universal set of rules designed by organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization and enforced by international investors and capital markets. But to most antiglobalizers, such global rules spell nothing but trouble, and the more poor nations shield themselves from them, the better off they are. Rodrik rejects the simplifications of both sides, showing that poor countries get rich not by copying what Washington technocrats preach or what others have done, but by overcoming their own highly specific constraints. And, far from conflicting with economic science, this is exactly what good economics teaches. "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 "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 "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 "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 "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
