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Spring 2000
Articles
Over the last two decades, the sale of state enterprises has gone from novelty act to global orthodoxy, generating more than $1 trillion in government revenues. Should average citizens cry or cheer? On balance, the latter. Although privatization’s promise may have been oversold, the right question is not whether but how to transfer state companies to private hands.
Ten years ago, Lori Wallach was a budding public interest lawyer. Today, she’s Public Enemy Number One in corporate boardrooms and multilateral economic institutions around the world. Don’t know her? You should. An unprecedented in-depth interview with the leader of the protests that helped spike U.S. fast-track trade legislation, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
Young populations, rising economic inequality, and the spread of televisions, guns, and drugs are making the world a more violent place and exacting severe economic and social costs. Yet despite the global dimensions of this trend, the most promising solutions may be local.
Almost any elected official in the world today risks being tainted by illegal contributions to his or her campaign, frequently from foreigners. Just ask Helmut Kohl, Bill Clinton, and Ehud Barak. What accounts for this worldwide outbreak of political corruption?
In their zeal to build Fortress America behind missile defenses, some U.S. politicians are tearing down the fragile political lattice of arms control agreements. But as faith in arms control weakens, several Asian nations are beginning to reconsider their self-imposed moratoriums on nuclear-weapon development. And if Asia goes nuclear, it could mean a new global arms race and a war that could engulf the world.
Throughout the 1990s, developing countries dutifully followed the economic prescriptions of the so-called Washington Consensus, only to find that the rules changed with every new financial crisis or avant-garde ideological whim. Economists have learned valuable lessons from their mistakes. Unfortunately, those lessons raise more questions than answers.
More than two decades before “globalization” became a buzzword, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye shed new light on transnational relations and the intensification of cross-border interactions in their seminal book, Power and Interdependence. Now, they take another long look at the interdependent world around them and discover what a difference two decades has made.
Western policy makers fret that economic turmoil will topple nascent democracies. Not quite. A closer look at 50 years of financial crises in Asia and Latin America suggests that democratic governments may be better equipped to survive economic woes than your everyday strongman.
Independence remains a powerful impulse for the creation of new states, particularly among peoples repressed by central governments. But one of the Clinton administration’s top policy makers argues that the rise of interdependence among nations offers a less drastic remedy for violent secessionist conflicts.