Are global institutions up to the challenges of globalization? | Jagdish Bhagwati | Big Think

Are global institutions up to the challenges of globalization?

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NGOs are getting too big for their britches.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jagdish Bhagwati:

One of the most influential trade theorists of his generation, Jagdish Bhagwati is a professor of economics at Columbia University and a Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1991-1993 Bhagwati was an Economic Policy Advisor to Arthur Dunkel, the Director of GATT. For the World Trade Organization, he has been an External Advisor to the WTO and has served on the Expert Group on the Future of the WTO appointed by the Director General. Bhagwati has been a Special Advisor to the UN on Globalization. He was also on the Advisory Committee to Secretary General Kofi Annan on the NEPAD process in Africa, and a member of the Eminent Persons Group under the chairmanship of President Fernando Henrique Cartoso on the future of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Bhagwati is the recipient of several prizes and honorary degrees, including Gold and Silver Stars from Japan's Order of the Rising Sun and the Padma Vibhushan from the government of India. The author and/or editor of over fifty volumes and over three hundred articles, Bhagwati's articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New Republic and The Times Literary Supplement. He founded the Journal of International Economics in 1971 and another journal, Economics & Politics, in 1989.

His most recent books are In Defense of Globalization (2004) and Free Trade Today (2002); his early books, particularly India: Planning for Industrialization (1970) and India (1975) opened the doors for current economic reform in India; on these reforms he was advisor to India's Finance Minister, now Prime Minister.

Bhagwati has delivered lectures at many top educational institutions and appeared on television shows including the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour, the Charlie Rose Show and Bloomberg. He is a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, on the board of the Academic Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch, Asia and on the Council of the Economic Priorities Accreditation Agency. The recipient of many awards, among them the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, the Bernhard Harms Prize, the Kenan Prize, the John R. Commons Award, the Freedom Prize and the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy, he has been awarded honorary degrees from several universities.

Jagdish Bhagwati graduated from Cambridge University in 1956 and continued his studies at MIT and Oxford. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, he was a professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, the Delhi School of Economics, and MIT.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Jagdish Bhagwati: They would have to be radically redone in some respects. Like take the World Bank. Particularly now with Robert ________, who is a trade guy. Trade is something which they push, they endorse. But what have they done in order to help?

Now let me talk about the poor countries which lack funds. They finally __________ come around; not their NGOs necessarily. Because they also have people who, some of the old leftists, and some populists, and some generally misguided NGOs. And people are inflecting their own little experience; objecting to this and saying it will lead to unemployment. It will lead to all kinds of problems. What have they done to help the poor countries build up the institutional system from which they can now proceed from an earlier attitude of anti-globalization to a current attitude of pro-globalization?

We are now trying to __________ like the Soviet system which was broken up from a completely controlled system with a little bit of black market activity into a modern system where suddenly you didn’t have the institutional support for it.

So my friend Jeffrey Sachs, who is a technocrat and who writes. I’m afraid he’s going to do for Africa what he did for Russia. Because technocracy is the big bane of many economists who simply feel they don’t understand the reality, the institutional context within which you want to place these things. So even advocated shock therapy.

Read the full transcript at