Rich World, Poor World: The Struggle to Escape Poverty

More than a few book-length studies have tried to explain why some developing countries made it into the club of advanced economies during the twentieth century and others did not. Allawi, a former deputy prime minister of Iraq, emphasizes the role of international politics, analyzing the impact on economic development of colonialism, the two world wars, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and China’s emergence as an economic and geopolitical power. He highlights the role of doctrine in the shaping of development policy, introducing different schools of thought, including the “big push” model of the 1940s that emphasized the need to get multiple industries up and running all at once; the “takeoff” model popularized in the 1950s by the American scholar Walt Rostow, who believed that all societies had to evolve through similar “stages of growth”; the so-called New International Economic Order proposed by poorer countries in the 1970s that sought to redress the imbalances between wealthier countries and those emerging from decades of colonialism; and the neoliberal, market-based Washington consensus that took hold in the 1980s. The book is strong because it is so comprehensive, covering more than a century of development experience over much of the world. But its scope is also, at times, a weakness in that the treatment can be a bit rushed. Still, one cannot help but be impressed by the author’s achievement in so fluently and concisely summarizing a century of global economic development and underdevelopment.