Development in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization.

• Author: Umut, Gokhan
• Position: Book review

Development in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization

Edited by Henry Veltmeyer

London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014, XIV+181 pages, $145.83, ISBN: 9780415830935.

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The capitalist development process has been criticized by many scholars due to its questionable effects on countries. After the privileging of neoliberal principles in Western national economies from the 1970s onward, discussions on the legitimacy of capitalism have increasingly continued. Undoubtedly, neoliberal policies have been questioned intensively in developing countries as well. The World Bank's confession that there is no empirical support for the effectiveness of neoliberal policies on developing nations could explain why policymakers in developing countries are unsure about the integration of their countries to the extreme liberalization of the economy.

Development in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization, a collection of articles and presented papers to pay tribute to Surendra Patel's substantial scholarship in development economics, is a significant contribution to the field. Many pro-globalization books tend to analyze the economic and social problems which are prevalent in today's world within the frame of neoliberal assumptions. According to these approaches, the main issue that people do not notice is that the market cannot conform to their assumptions. However, many studies indicate that the problem is not about the market's inability to adjust to the assumptions, but the capitalist economic system itself. In this sense, this book fills the gap, in part, as it aims to "analyze the progress and failures of capitalist development against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized world economy organized on neoliberal principles" (p. i). While the various contributors discuss different issues in the book, there is a consensus on the drawbacks of globalization and the Western exploitation of the rest of the world.

In the first chapter, entitled "Mercantilist Origins of Capitalism and Its Legacies: Decline of the West and Rise of the Rest," Kari Polanyi Levi delves into the mercantilist origins of industrial capitalism and the fluctuating hegemony of the West in the post-neoliberal capitalist development era. She emphasizes the unbalanced conditions of the world order, in which wealth and prosperity has accumulated in the Global North although though the population, especially the young one, is agglomerated in the Global South. She asserts...