Customer Rating:  
Summary: Detailed and Unbiased
Comment: This book presents an in-depth look into the structure and history of the IMF and Wold Bank. Through the use of case studies, the author outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the procedures and culture that have steered these organizations to their current financial and political stature. This thoroughly researched text provides the reader ample statistics and facts to back its conclusions, and stays away from oversimplifications and all-to-common ideological biases.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hard to read but incisive, 200 pages of tightly packed information
Comment: This book is definitely not in any way pop-nonfiction -- it is written more like a scientifical publification -- so it is tough to comprehend it at times (especially for a non-native with only average English skills). The book is highly rewarding nontheless -- the most balanced and insighting introduction of these two institutions I have read.
It studies the IMF/World Bank effect in Mexico, Russia and Africa, gives a bit of a background of the globalizers and finally comes up with actual ways in how they could be reformed.
If you don't want to be radically pro- or anti-globalization -- only know about it -- this might be the book you should get. It helps if you have some kind of a previous idea about IMF and World Bank.
"The IMF and the World Bank have integrated a large number of countries into the world economy by requiring governments to open up to global trade, investment, and capital. They have not done this out of pure economic zeal. Politics and their own rules and habits explain much of why they have presented globalization as a solution to challenges they have faced in the world economy."--from the Introduction The greatest success of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has been as globalizers. But at whose cost? Would borrowing countries be better off without the IMF and World Bank? This book takes readers inside these institutions and the governments they work with. Ngaire Woods brilliantly decodes what they do and why they do it, using original research, extensive interviews carried out across many countries and institutions, and scholarship from the fields of economics, law, and politics. The Globalizers focuses on both the political context of IMF and World Bank actions and their impact on the countries in which they intervene. After describing the important debates between U.S. planners and the Allies in the 1944 foundation at Bretton Woods, she analyzes understandings of their missions over the last quarter century. She traces the impact of the Bank and the Fund in the recent economic history of Mexico, of post-Soviet Russia, and in the independent states of Africa. Woods concludes by proposing a range of reforms that would make the World Bank and the IMF more effective, equitable, and just.
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