- Email: [email protected]
Economic sanctions as instruments of American foreign policy
356
Book Reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
to grow coffee because Colombia can produce it cheaper due to its comparative natural advantage (99). For Palley, who has taken great pains to present a cogent, comprehensive critique of the current state of capitalism, to recommend orthodox trade policy as a solution to the question of trade with less developed countries strikes me as odd. Granted, he is prescribing solutions within the capitalist paradigm only, but this approach disregards the human exploitation and rampant underdevelopment that has historically been the result of orthodox trade policy. Palley’s one-sided, nationalistic concern for American workers, and his total disregard for the well-being of workers in developing countries, are rather mystifying. This trade policy example strikes to the heart of my macro criticism of this book. Palley uses an enormous amount of interesting and convincing information regarding the destruction of the American dream and the domination of business over labor interests, but his reluctance to see that these problems are inherent in a capitalist system, rather than particular to this epoch of capitalism, is frustrating. Even given those criticisms, this book is still an extremely useful resource in particular as a general guide to the direction that the U.S. economy has taken over the last twenty-five years. Palley also raises some important issues to which orthodox texts fail to give even the briefest of mention. Chapter 4 devotes five pages to the subject of worker insecurity and stress. And chapter 8 contains an intelligent, five-page discussion about the Balanced Budget Amendment, and details the reasons why such an amendment is not a good idea. In the final analysis, Plenty of Nothing is certainly worthwhile reading for those seeking an alternative economic perspective, as it raises issues and asks questions that are simply ignored by orthodox texts. But since some of Palley’s answers leave much to be desired from a progressive standpoint, it is clear that this book must be read with a critical eye. Chris Madden Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism, ’01 3315 Pleasant Ave., Apt. 520 Union City, NJ 07087, USA E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S0486-6134(01)00081-X
Economic Sanctions as Instruments of American Foreign Policy Zachary Selden; Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. 147 pp. ⫹ index, $49.95 hb. As a tool of statecraft, economic sanctions fall somewhere between the poles of isolationism and military intervention. Sanctions allow a state to demonstrate, through nonmilitary means, its opposition to behavior deemed threatening to regional or global stability. This flexibility has made their use more popular in the international arena. They have become the default option in security policy for Great Powers and supranational organizations. The United States, in particular, increased its use of sanctions significantly during the Cold War
Book Reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
357
and post-Cold War eras. Since 1980, it imposed them over a dozen times against countries such as Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nicaragua, North Korea, Serbia, and Vietnam. Though the United States has recently eased sanctions against some of these nations, congress is currently debating the imposition of sanctions against China for its alleged sales of weapons of mass destruction to Pakistan. Such action could have adverse effects on the development of both nations’ economies, hitting the working classes especially hard. The rise in the use of sanctions has sparked a fierce debate over their utility and consequences. Critics continue to doubt the effectiveness of sanctions, especially considering the humanitarian toll on the poor living in target societies. Current events support this assessment, most notably the humanitarian crisis that has emerged in Iraq since the end of the Persian Gulf War. The resignation of two United Nations humanitarian coordinators for Iraq, and the Iraqi Parliament’s call for discussions on the effects of 10 years of U.N. sanctions, underscore the divisiveness over this issue. In a presentation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party even noted the impact of this “feel-good policy of the self-righteous” on the weak, calling it America’s “silent weapon of mass destruction.”1 In this book, Zachary Selden, Research Director for Emerging Threats at Business Executives for National Security, offers a comprehensive examination of the sanctions debate, and challenges both sides to consider the subtle and unique forms that sanctions may assume. Selden begins with a discussion of the theoretical and empirical research that has advanced our knowledge of sanctions’ usage since World War II. He divides the literature on sanctions into two categories. Some investigations use comprehensive case studies showing the effects that sanctions have on import substitution. According to Selden, such research makes no attempt to generalize observations. Theoretical discussions of other studies also fail, in his view, to provide sufficient empirical data regarding the counterproductive and unanticipated effects of sanctions. Selden notes that the comprehensive work of Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot finds sanctions to be most effective when the sanction-imposing nation (sender) and sanction-receiving nation (target) have close economic relations. Such success also occurs when the sender’s demands are minor in nature. By contrast, other research (e.g., Baldwin, Doxey, Martin, Kaempfer and Lowenberg, Knorr, Nincic and Wallensteen, and Tsebelis) finds that international cooperation is the critical factor in determining the successful implementation of sanctions. These studies assume that the greater the multilateral coordination of sanctions on a target is, “the greater the probability will be of imposing an unacceptable cost” on that country (7). He also notes that some scholars (e.g., Willett and Cooper) either find sanctions to induce unexpected behavior from the target, or find that they benefit certain domestic sectors of the target’s economy. While the latter studies recognize that sanctions yield unintended consequences by magnifying undesirable behavior, Selden observes two general deficiencies in all of the studies. First, none differentiate between sanction types. In addition, 1 CNN.Com, “Buchanan Vows to Lift Sanctions against ‘Rogue’ Nations,” December 16, 1999, (http:// www.cnn.com/1999/ALLPOLITICS/stories/12/16/buchanan.foreign/index.html).
358
Book Reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
none examine the import substitution effects of sanctions over several case samples to determine if and how different instances of sanctions vary by the sanction type imposed. Selden goes on to identify sanction types in an attempt to uncover the effects that particular sanctions have on the target country’s policy choice and economic conditions. The author first differentiates sanctions by categorizing them as trade-disrupting and financial. Import and export sanctions comprise the former. He then assumes that if export sanctions promote import substitution labor production, import and financial sanctions should not. His study finds that export sanctions, unlike others, function as protective tariffs. They eliminate the competition of foreign-produced goods, and consequently stimulate domestic production. Although this has a tariff-producing effect that raises prices in the target country, the gains made by domestic producers offset, in his opinion, the losses to domestic consumers. Sanctions, thus, have a wealth-producing effect for import substitution producers. From this, Selden posits that some domestic groups within a target population benefit from the sanctions and actually support their continuation. Therefore, import substitution producers will remain indifferent to the negative consequences of sanctions for domestic consumers and exporters. Selden carefully develops and tests his theory with industrial surveys taken by the United Nations Statistical Office. The data set consists of 20 cases, representing a demographically diverse group of sanctioned countries and their manufacturing output indexed to a particular year. The author divides his model and data into two categories (pure financial sanctions and a combination of trade-disrupting and financial sanctions) to test the variance in manufacturing growth against the type of sanction imposed on the target. The regression reveals that export sanctions are more likely to cause import substitution than financial sanctions. The average percentage change in manufacturing growth totaled 246 percent under trade-disrupting sanctions compared to only 36 percent in cases of purely financial ones. The manufacturing index growth rate after the imposition of trade-disrupting sanctions, indeed, surpassed the growth rate before the imposition of those sanctions. Selden then emphasizes the contradicting political effects of economic sanctions. He terms these the fifth column and rally around the flag effects. Regarding the former, a sender country imposes sanctions against a target with the hope of creating support from the target’s population. Because import and financial sanctions by the sender harm export-oriented producers and entrepreneurs in the target country, these key sectors of the target economy should exert “pressure on their government to comply with the demands of the sender” (6). Both import and financial sanctions, the author argues, create such intended results. By contrast, Selden explains how the rally effect produces the opposite result. He assumes that a sender country, which issues export sanctions against a target, provides a common enemy around whom the target population can unite. This action should increase the popularity for the policies of the present leadership. Those actors who gain from these export sanctions can be expected to back the current government, because they will have a stake in seeing the continuation of those sanctions and the policies prompting them. In this way, Selden shows how export sanctions should make a target country more self-sufficient by encouraging the expansion of import substitution production among those industrialists with a vested interest in continued sanctions. The author then posits that gainers from sanctions have two advantages over losers. First, the financial resources of gainers will increase from sanctions. They naturally will forgo a
Book Reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
359
portion of their gains to lobby the present regime for favorable treatment of their interests. Second, winners form a small group compared to losers. By adopting Mancur Olson’s collective action theory, Selden assumes that the smaller size will give gainers an organizational advantage. Selden provides empirical support for his argument through an examination of two case studies. One involves a combination of financial and trade-disrupting sanctions imposed on South Africa and Rhodesia. The other describes the imposition of financial sanctions on Sri Lanka. In the former, sanctions, while successful in the long-run, had an unintended rally effect by increasing domestic production and support for the ruling parties for several decades. In the latter, sanctions successfully reduced the fortunes of elites in the ruling party, creating a fifth column effect which forced the government to change direction. Selden’s statistical data includes patterns in trade, political party affiliation, national elections, and migration. Selden goes on to examine three other cases. The first reviews the U.S. embargo of Great Britain between 1807 and 1811. Here, the author employs a modern public-choice approach to explain how sanctions spawn pressure groups which arise to defend their interests. By using census data to determine if a Member of Parliament (MP) was from an agriculture or manufacturing district, Selden provides a reasonable indicator predicting an MP’s vote on the 1807 Orders in Council (OIC), which mandated the British navy to seize neutral cargo ships bound for continental Europe. While the Britain of that era was not a modern democracy, the case shows how U.S. sanctions increased British landowner support for the OIC. The continuation of sanctions created a monopolizing opportunity for wheat producers, enriching them at the expense of British consumers and merchants. Selden reinforces this argument in two contemporary case studies. Each illustrates how the three sanction types induce structural changes on the citizens and governments in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq. In Yugoslavia, sanctions increased corrupt behavior between the governmental elite and organized criminal syndicates, especially in the petroleum trade. This linkage eliminated the economic prospects of the urban middle class, ultimately driving them out of the country. This action weakened the moderate base of progressive democratic reform and strengthened radical and nationalistic forces. In Iraq, although sanctions similarly reduced living conditions to intolerable levels, they failed to alter the political regime in power. In fact, while sanctions worsened the living standards of the general population, the lifestyle of the ruling elite and their supporters seems to have actually improved. Selden shows that Western sanctions led to the establishment of an illegal oil trade, as it had in Yugoslavia, as well as to government policies (e.g., farm loans and land-lease programs) that increased revenues for certain well-connected individuals and groups. This book is concise and well constructed. Though Selden’s study fails to add new insight into economic theory, it does enhance our knowledge of the use of sanctions and their general effects on different sectors of a target economy. The book’s primary value lies in its differentiation of sanction types. Moreover, the use of 20 case studies highlights the effective use and unintended consequences of sanctions. In this way, the author advances our understanding of the theory of sanctions. At the same time, however, more space could have been devoted to positive sanctions and the effects of sanctions on the poor. The former evokes methods that achieve behavioral modification through cooperative resolutions between sender and target, while the latter seeks to illuminate the
360
Book review / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
impact incurred by sanctions’ losers who typically have little political recourse under repressive regimes. While Selden’s findings indicate that trade-disrupting sanctions harm consumer and export interests in targeted states, he fails to address in detail the negative economic effects that sanctions create for the income and living standards of the poor, minorities, women, and young in those states. In some respects, the book comes close to actually validating the continued use of sanctions by powerful nations at the expense of the poor and powerless. The book also fails to address the utility of sanctions in this era of globalization. From a radical view, sanctions’ usage seems uselessly harmful and even illogical regarding economic development. This appears especially true in light of increased liberalization and democratization. If the leaders of powerful nations and supranational organizations truly care about the poor both at home and abroad, then they should endeavor to find alternative approaches toward producing progressive political and economic change before settling on measures that endanger people on both sides of sanctions’ policy. Hopefully, policymakers will be able to recognize the human-interest story embedded in this book before they rush headlong with its findings to the sanctions-producing factory. John D. Baxter Old Dominion University Grad. Program in Intl. Studies 620 Batten Arts & Letters Bldg Norfolk, VA 23529, USA E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S0486-6134(01)00082-1
Ideas and Economic Policy in Latin America: Regional, National and Organizational Case Studies Anil Hira, Westport, CT.: Praeger Publishers, 1998. 182 pp. ⫹ index, $59.95 hb. In the twentieth century, economists and economic ideas have found center stage in the Latin American struggle towards economic development. In Ideas and Economic Policy in Latin America: Regional, National and Organizational Case Studies, Anil Hira, assistant professor of political science at Tulane University, has turned our focus upon the core economic policy makers and advisors and the ideas they promoted and enacted in postAlessandri Chile (since 1964). This book, an outgrowth of the author’s 1997 dissertation completed at the Claremont Graduate School, is a conventional study and historical review of the economic ideas and economists/economic leaders of two distinct Chilean ideological groups: the structuralists influenced by ECLA (the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), and the neoliberals as promulgated by the “Chicago Boys.” The author’s explicit purpose for writing the book is to attempt to elucidate “how ideas affect political economy decisions in the developing world” (1). The author tackles this objective in eight chapters: chapter one provides an introduction and very brief overview of selected approaches of political economy (international level, domestic coalitions, statist, and
Book Reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
to grow coffee because Colombia can produce it cheaper due to its comparative natural advantage (99). For Palley, who has taken great pains to present a cogent, comprehensive critique of the current state of capitalism, to recommend orthodox trade policy as a solution to the question of trade with less developed countries strikes me as odd. Granted, he is prescribing solutions within the capitalist paradigm only, but this approach disregards the human exploitation and rampant underdevelopment that has historically been the result of orthodox trade policy. Palley’s one-sided, nationalistic concern for American workers, and his total disregard for the well-being of workers in developing countries, are rather mystifying. This trade policy example strikes to the heart of my macro criticism of this book. Palley uses an enormous amount of interesting and convincing information regarding the destruction of the American dream and the domination of business over labor interests, but his reluctance to see that these problems are inherent in a capitalist system, rather than particular to this epoch of capitalism, is frustrating. Even given those criticisms, this book is still an extremely useful resource in particular as a general guide to the direction that the U.S. economy has taken over the last twenty-five years. Palley also raises some important issues to which orthodox texts fail to give even the briefest of mention. Chapter 4 devotes five pages to the subject of worker insecurity and stress. And chapter 8 contains an intelligent, five-page discussion about the Balanced Budget Amendment, and details the reasons why such an amendment is not a good idea. In the final analysis, Plenty of Nothing is certainly worthwhile reading for those seeking an alternative economic perspective, as it raises issues and asks questions that are simply ignored by orthodox texts. But since some of Palley’s answers leave much to be desired from a progressive standpoint, it is clear that this book must be read with a critical eye. Chris Madden Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism, ’01 3315 Pleasant Ave., Apt. 520 Union City, NJ 07087, USA E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S0486-6134(01)00081-X
Economic Sanctions as Instruments of American Foreign Policy Zachary Selden; Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. 147 pp. ⫹ index, $49.95 hb. As a tool of statecraft, economic sanctions fall somewhere between the poles of isolationism and military intervention. Sanctions allow a state to demonstrate, through nonmilitary means, its opposition to behavior deemed threatening to regional or global stability. This flexibility has made their use more popular in the international arena. They have become the default option in security policy for Great Powers and supranational organizations. The United States, in particular, increased its use of sanctions significantly during the Cold War
Book Reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
357
and post-Cold War eras. Since 1980, it imposed them over a dozen times against countries such as Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nicaragua, North Korea, Serbia, and Vietnam. Though the United States has recently eased sanctions against some of these nations, congress is currently debating the imposition of sanctions against China for its alleged sales of weapons of mass destruction to Pakistan. Such action could have adverse effects on the development of both nations’ economies, hitting the working classes especially hard. The rise in the use of sanctions has sparked a fierce debate over their utility and consequences. Critics continue to doubt the effectiveness of sanctions, especially considering the humanitarian toll on the poor living in target societies. Current events support this assessment, most notably the humanitarian crisis that has emerged in Iraq since the end of the Persian Gulf War. The resignation of two United Nations humanitarian coordinators for Iraq, and the Iraqi Parliament’s call for discussions on the effects of 10 years of U.N. sanctions, underscore the divisiveness over this issue. In a presentation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party even noted the impact of this “feel-good policy of the self-righteous” on the weak, calling it America’s “silent weapon of mass destruction.”1 In this book, Zachary Selden, Research Director for Emerging Threats at Business Executives for National Security, offers a comprehensive examination of the sanctions debate, and challenges both sides to consider the subtle and unique forms that sanctions may assume. Selden begins with a discussion of the theoretical and empirical research that has advanced our knowledge of sanctions’ usage since World War II. He divides the literature on sanctions into two categories. Some investigations use comprehensive case studies showing the effects that sanctions have on import substitution. According to Selden, such research makes no attempt to generalize observations. Theoretical discussions of other studies also fail, in his view, to provide sufficient empirical data regarding the counterproductive and unanticipated effects of sanctions. Selden notes that the comprehensive work of Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot finds sanctions to be most effective when the sanction-imposing nation (sender) and sanction-receiving nation (target) have close economic relations. Such success also occurs when the sender’s demands are minor in nature. By contrast, other research (e.g., Baldwin, Doxey, Martin, Kaempfer and Lowenberg, Knorr, Nincic and Wallensteen, and Tsebelis) finds that international cooperation is the critical factor in determining the successful implementation of sanctions. These studies assume that the greater the multilateral coordination of sanctions on a target is, “the greater the probability will be of imposing an unacceptable cost” on that country (7). He also notes that some scholars (e.g., Willett and Cooper) either find sanctions to induce unexpected behavior from the target, or find that they benefit certain domestic sectors of the target’s economy. While the latter studies recognize that sanctions yield unintended consequences by magnifying undesirable behavior, Selden observes two general deficiencies in all of the studies. First, none differentiate between sanction types. In addition, 1 CNN.Com, “Buchanan Vows to Lift Sanctions against ‘Rogue’ Nations,” December 16, 1999, (http:// www.cnn.com/1999/ALLPOLITICS/stories/12/16/buchanan.foreign/index.html).
358
Book Reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
none examine the import substitution effects of sanctions over several case samples to determine if and how different instances of sanctions vary by the sanction type imposed. Selden goes on to identify sanction types in an attempt to uncover the effects that particular sanctions have on the target country’s policy choice and economic conditions. The author first differentiates sanctions by categorizing them as trade-disrupting and financial. Import and export sanctions comprise the former. He then assumes that if export sanctions promote import substitution labor production, import and financial sanctions should not. His study finds that export sanctions, unlike others, function as protective tariffs. They eliminate the competition of foreign-produced goods, and consequently stimulate domestic production. Although this has a tariff-producing effect that raises prices in the target country, the gains made by domestic producers offset, in his opinion, the losses to domestic consumers. Sanctions, thus, have a wealth-producing effect for import substitution producers. From this, Selden posits that some domestic groups within a target population benefit from the sanctions and actually support their continuation. Therefore, import substitution producers will remain indifferent to the negative consequences of sanctions for domestic consumers and exporters. Selden carefully develops and tests his theory with industrial surveys taken by the United Nations Statistical Office. The data set consists of 20 cases, representing a demographically diverse group of sanctioned countries and their manufacturing output indexed to a particular year. The author divides his model and data into two categories (pure financial sanctions and a combination of trade-disrupting and financial sanctions) to test the variance in manufacturing growth against the type of sanction imposed on the target. The regression reveals that export sanctions are more likely to cause import substitution than financial sanctions. The average percentage change in manufacturing growth totaled 246 percent under trade-disrupting sanctions compared to only 36 percent in cases of purely financial ones. The manufacturing index growth rate after the imposition of trade-disrupting sanctions, indeed, surpassed the growth rate before the imposition of those sanctions. Selden then emphasizes the contradicting political effects of economic sanctions. He terms these the fifth column and rally around the flag effects. Regarding the former, a sender country imposes sanctions against a target with the hope of creating support from the target’s population. Because import and financial sanctions by the sender harm export-oriented producers and entrepreneurs in the target country, these key sectors of the target economy should exert “pressure on their government to comply with the demands of the sender” (6). Both import and financial sanctions, the author argues, create such intended results. By contrast, Selden explains how the rally effect produces the opposite result. He assumes that a sender country, which issues export sanctions against a target, provides a common enemy around whom the target population can unite. This action should increase the popularity for the policies of the present leadership. Those actors who gain from these export sanctions can be expected to back the current government, because they will have a stake in seeing the continuation of those sanctions and the policies prompting them. In this way, Selden shows how export sanctions should make a target country more self-sufficient by encouraging the expansion of import substitution production among those industrialists with a vested interest in continued sanctions. The author then posits that gainers from sanctions have two advantages over losers. First, the financial resources of gainers will increase from sanctions. They naturally will forgo a
Book Reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
359
portion of their gains to lobby the present regime for favorable treatment of their interests. Second, winners form a small group compared to losers. By adopting Mancur Olson’s collective action theory, Selden assumes that the smaller size will give gainers an organizational advantage. Selden provides empirical support for his argument through an examination of two case studies. One involves a combination of financial and trade-disrupting sanctions imposed on South Africa and Rhodesia. The other describes the imposition of financial sanctions on Sri Lanka. In the former, sanctions, while successful in the long-run, had an unintended rally effect by increasing domestic production and support for the ruling parties for several decades. In the latter, sanctions successfully reduced the fortunes of elites in the ruling party, creating a fifth column effect which forced the government to change direction. Selden’s statistical data includes patterns in trade, political party affiliation, national elections, and migration. Selden goes on to examine three other cases. The first reviews the U.S. embargo of Great Britain between 1807 and 1811. Here, the author employs a modern public-choice approach to explain how sanctions spawn pressure groups which arise to defend their interests. By using census data to determine if a Member of Parliament (MP) was from an agriculture or manufacturing district, Selden provides a reasonable indicator predicting an MP’s vote on the 1807 Orders in Council (OIC), which mandated the British navy to seize neutral cargo ships bound for continental Europe. While the Britain of that era was not a modern democracy, the case shows how U.S. sanctions increased British landowner support for the OIC. The continuation of sanctions created a monopolizing opportunity for wheat producers, enriching them at the expense of British consumers and merchants. Selden reinforces this argument in two contemporary case studies. Each illustrates how the three sanction types induce structural changes on the citizens and governments in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq. In Yugoslavia, sanctions increased corrupt behavior between the governmental elite and organized criminal syndicates, especially in the petroleum trade. This linkage eliminated the economic prospects of the urban middle class, ultimately driving them out of the country. This action weakened the moderate base of progressive democratic reform and strengthened radical and nationalistic forces. In Iraq, although sanctions similarly reduced living conditions to intolerable levels, they failed to alter the political regime in power. In fact, while sanctions worsened the living standards of the general population, the lifestyle of the ruling elite and their supporters seems to have actually improved. Selden shows that Western sanctions led to the establishment of an illegal oil trade, as it had in Yugoslavia, as well as to government policies (e.g., farm loans and land-lease programs) that increased revenues for certain well-connected individuals and groups. This book is concise and well constructed. Though Selden’s study fails to add new insight into economic theory, it does enhance our knowledge of the use of sanctions and their general effects on different sectors of a target economy. The book’s primary value lies in its differentiation of sanction types. Moreover, the use of 20 case studies highlights the effective use and unintended consequences of sanctions. In this way, the author advances our understanding of the theory of sanctions. At the same time, however, more space could have been devoted to positive sanctions and the effects of sanctions on the poor. The former evokes methods that achieve behavioral modification through cooperative resolutions between sender and target, while the latter seeks to illuminate the
360
Book review / Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2001) 351–373
impact incurred by sanctions’ losers who typically have little political recourse under repressive regimes. While Selden’s findings indicate that trade-disrupting sanctions harm consumer and export interests in targeted states, he fails to address in detail the negative economic effects that sanctions create for the income and living standards of the poor, minorities, women, and young in those states. In some respects, the book comes close to actually validating the continued use of sanctions by powerful nations at the expense of the poor and powerless. The book also fails to address the utility of sanctions in this era of globalization. From a radical view, sanctions’ usage seems uselessly harmful and even illogical regarding economic development. This appears especially true in light of increased liberalization and democratization. If the leaders of powerful nations and supranational organizations truly care about the poor both at home and abroad, then they should endeavor to find alternative approaches toward producing progressive political and economic change before settling on measures that endanger people on both sides of sanctions’ policy. Hopefully, policymakers will be able to recognize the human-interest story embedded in this book before they rush headlong with its findings to the sanctions-producing factory. John D. Baxter Old Dominion University Grad. Program in Intl. Studies 620 Batten Arts & Letters Bldg Norfolk, VA 23529, USA E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S0486-6134(01)00082-1
Ideas and Economic Policy in Latin America: Regional, National and Organizational Case Studies Anil Hira, Westport, CT.: Praeger Publishers, 1998. 182 pp. ⫹ index, $59.95 hb. In the twentieth century, economists and economic ideas have found center stage in the Latin American struggle towards economic development. In Ideas and Economic Policy in Latin America: Regional, National and Organizational Case Studies, Anil Hira, assistant professor of political science at Tulane University, has turned our focus upon the core economic policy makers and advisors and the ideas they promoted and enacted in postAlessandri Chile (since 1964). This book, an outgrowth of the author’s 1997 dissertation completed at the Claremont Graduate School, is a conventional study and historical review of the economic ideas and economists/economic leaders of two distinct Chilean ideological groups: the structuralists influenced by ECLA (the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), and the neoliberals as promulgated by the “Chicago Boys.” The author’s explicit purpose for writing the book is to attempt to elucidate “how ideas affect political economy decisions in the developing world” (1). The author tackles this objective in eight chapters: chapter one provides an introduction and very brief overview of selected approaches of political economy (international level, domestic coalitions, statist, and