Synopses & Reviews
This book takes a fresh look at this issue in economic policy. Graham Dunkley provides a critical history of international trade and an alternative analysis to orthodox doctrines about trade policy. He argues that trade, although a natural economic process, has today become much more complex, deregulated and divorced from development than is desirable. He concludes by suggesting elements of a new approach to development and an alternative world trading and economic order.
Synopsis
In this book Australian economist, Graham Dunkley, explains and critiques the crucial concept of free trade. A policy of free trade is central to today's world-dominating globalization project. The more euphoric globalists uncritically assume that it has universal and unequivocal benefits for all people and countries. And the perpetual negotiations of the World Trade Organization are wholly based on this presumption.
Graham Dunkley shows, however, that leading economists have always been more sceptical about free trade doctrine than the dogmatic globalizers realize. There are more holes in free trade theory than its advocates grasp. And the benefits of free trade in practice are more limited and contingent than they acknowledge.
He also argues that the World Bank's long-time push for export-led development is misguided. A more democratic world trading order is necessary and possible. And more interventionist, self-reliant trade policies are feasible, especially if a more holistic view of economic development goals is adopted.
About the Author
Graham Dunkley is Senior Lecturer in Economics in the Faculty of Business, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Trade, Myth and Obsession
2. That‘s the Theory! Debating Free Trade Doctrine Forever
3. A Confederacy of Heretics: Two Centuries of Free Trade Dissent
4. What About the Practice? Trading and Free Trade in History and Reality
5. Development: Myths and Alternatives: A Critique of Globalising Growth
6. The Export Cult: The Import Substitution versus Export Orientation Debate
7. The Self-Reliance Option: Global Myths and Alternative Development
8. The Free Trade Adventure: The WTO, Global Myths and Alternatives
9. Conclusion