Alternative models for grass roots economic development such as micro-financing are now being widely adopted in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and elsewhere. New views on measuring development such as GDH (gross domestic happiness) have been adopted by Bhutan rather than GDP, and China's own hybrid approach combining market and planned policy to achieve economic transformation offer new choices for developing countries. All of these are representative of a new wave of thinking that rejects the increasingly discredited policies of the IMF and World Bank.
It is easy to criticise the views of activists who take to the street every time the World Bank, IMF, WTO or World Economic Forum meet. However they are driven by hard concerns which are not calling for an end to globalization but a reorientation of what this means. They are challenging notions of accepted economic and business parlance, calling for fair trade rather than just free trade; balanced rather than fast growth; and protection of domestic cottage industries and with it ethnic diversification and social identity. In many respects the term is a misnomer. They are calling for fairer re-distribution of the fruits of globalization and a humane reduction of its side-effects through sensitivities to local conditional realities.
This book brings together the views of many of the world's leading thinkers in alternative policy studies. Their collective views represent a fascinating insight into a growing movement that is slowly but surely affecting the way the world does business.
The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club sets forth a blueprint for a new form of compassionate capitalism. While some may see if as radical, others will view it is a prophetic vision of a new order structured according to the concrete needs of contemporary development. It calls for a world of prioritized environmental protection, ethnic diversity and cultural sustainability, declaring credit, health care and a clean environment to be universal human rights.
Author Laurence Brahm build his arguments upon personal experience. Tracking his years as a central bank advisor to Asian economies in transition from socialism to market economies, he reveals the struggles with the IMF and World Bank over policy decisions that set in play new Asian growth models.
Traveling across South Asia from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to Nepal, India and Pakistan, he explores the common concerns of grassroots organizations and fuses them into a concord of ideas that offer an alternative to the Washington Consensus.
Change is desperately needed in the wake of the global economic meltdown and collapse of the financial order. The world cries out for a new economic model that will lead the way to a more enlightened future. This book represents a significant contribution to the debate. Brahm's experience-based paradigm, the Himalayan consensus, integrates U.N. millennium goals of protecting our environment, reducing poverty and closing income gaps between rich and poor. This requires re-engineering our basic assumptions about market economics and overhauling the models we have taken for granted, heralding a new era of compassionate development. This book will make you rethink the values and motivations that drive us every day.
