Globalization Without Tears: an economist debates the NGOS.

• Author: Loungani, Prakash
• Position: Book Review

Globlization Without Tears An economist debates the NGOs.

In Defense of Globalization, by Jagdish Bhagwati, New York: Oxford University Press, 308 pages, $28

ONE'S FIRST IMPULSE on coming across yet another book on globalization, even (or particularly?) by a Nobel-caliber economist, is surely to keep on moving: Most turn out to be dry treatises that end up convincing readers they were right to hate their economics courses in college.

It's an impulse worth resisting in the case of Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defense of Globalization, a book that amuses as it instructs. The author, a professor at Columbia University and one of the world's leading scholars of international trade and development, has grappled in many arenas with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)--the leaders in the fight against "globalization," the process of economic integration of nations through trade and international flows of capital and people. He understands why NGOs fear that globalization causes social ills. But while he concedes that some of the anti-globalizers' complaints have merit, he is bold enough to label their arguments "rubbish" when warranted.

Bhagwati concludes that fears of globalization deserve an "extended and careful response," not out-of-hand dismissal, but are in the end "a false alarm." He is mostly satisfied with what globalization has accomplished. But some of his recommendations for moving it to a next step, one more congenial to its current ideological enemies, are ultimately unconvincing.

Bhagwati's book starts by discussing the rise of the NGO movement because, as he generously acknowledges, the debates over the effects over globalization today owe their "salience, shape and content" to this movement. But he slyly suggests that the NGOs' rise might be more in the number of groups than in the number of citizens they represent. Take pity, he says, on poor Nigel Wilkinson, whose branch of the Radical Left Movement for Socialist Revolution had to be disbanded after the group's membership dwindled "by almost 70 percent over the last year from a peak of three members to just one--himself."

Wilkinson's sad fate notwithstanding, the NGO movement has grown into a global phenomenon. Bhagwati offers a variety of explanations. Among the poorer nations, the expansion in the education of women is a cause; in India these days, Bhagwati jokes, it's easier to attract a bride by offering her an NGO than by offering her a green card. In transition economies, he says, NGOs were a natural outgrowth of the "parallel politics" developed by Vaclav Havel and others as a "weapon for democratic progress in regimes governed by communists." But it is in the rich countries--and particularly among the young there--that the NGO movement has really taken off.

The young, says Bhagwati, see (or think they see) capitalism falling to deliver social justice. Lacking direct experience or...