Jagdish Bhagwati, The Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization.

• Author: KINDLEBERGER, CHARLES P.

Jagdish Bhagwati, The Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization, The M.I.T. Press, 2001.

Worldly View Of Globalization

Jagdish Bhagwati is a leading economist of international trade--many think the world's leader in the field--and also a public intellectual and evangelical free trader. This book collects forty-six pieces of varying length, published mostly in 1997, 1998, and 1999, consisting of lectures, articles for Festschriften, book reviews, letters to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the London Financial Times. A number of lectures were delivered when Professor Bhagwati was being awarded a prize. He was recently elected to a high competitive office in the American Economic Association. He consulted for two years with the World Trade Organization. He writes with panache.

Globalization in his view consists of free trade, direct foreign investment (by companies), and immigration, but not short-term capital movements, which are unstable. He strongly opposes "linkages" that tie measures for freer trade, to provisions in human rights, labor rules, and environment, anathema to many Republicans and officials of developing countries, who view them as disguised protection. In his view, these other goals in foreign policy should be treated separately from trade by other inter-governmental bodies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on issues such as preserving culture by supporting French movies and Canadian magazines threatened by American colossi. He would leave child labor, for example, to the International Labor Organization, though it has been working on the problem since its founding in the 1920's. (He notes that there were 250 million children at work throughout the world in 1996.) He even states that parents in India and Bangladesh need the money and that the alternative to child labor may be child starvation.

A strong argument against linkage comes in Jan Tinbergen's On the Theory of Economic Policy (North Holland Publishing Co., 1952), which is that one needs as many tools as one has goals, or "you cannot kill two birds with one stone." There is, however, something on the other side, in Harry Johnson's and Bhagwati's theory of the "second best." If the best tool fails to work or work is unavailable, try the second best, and so on down to the nth best. Bhagwati opposes tying human rights to China's admission to the World Trade Organization, but does note that the embargo on trade with South...