An ambitious account of the corrosion of liberal democracy in rich and poor countries alike, arguing that antidemocratic sentiment reflects fear of material and cultural loss, not a critique of liberalism's failure to deliver equality, and suggesting possible ways out. The retreat of liberal democracy in the twenty-first century has been impossible to ignore. From Wisconsin to Warsaw, Budapest to Bangalore, the public is turning against pluralism and liberal institutions and instead professing unapologetic nationalism and majoritarianism. Critics of inequality argue that this is a predictable response to failures of capitalism and liberalism, but Pranab Bardhan, a development economist, sees things differently. The problem is not inequality but insecurity-financial and cultural. Bardhan notes that antidemocratic movements have taken root globally in a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic groups. In the United States, older, less-educated, rural populations have withdrawn from democracy. But in India, the prevailing Hindu Nationalists enjoy the support of educated, aspirational urban youth. And in Europe, antidemocratic populists firmly back the welfare state (but for nonimmigrants). What is consistent among antidemocrats is fear of losing what they have. That could be money but is most often national pride and culture and the comfort of tradition. A World of Insecurity argues for context-sensitive responses. Some, like universal basic income schemes, are better suited to poor countries. Others, like worker empowerment and international coordination, have broader appeal. But improving material security won't be enough to sustain democracy. Nor, Bardhan writes, should we be tempted by the ultimately hollow lure of China's authoritarian model. He urges liberals to adopt at least a grudging respect for fellow citizens' local attachments. By affirming civic forms of community pride, we might hope to temper cultural anxieties before they become pathological.

Would improving the economic, social, and political condition of the world's disadvantaged people slow--or accelerate--environmental degradation? In "Inequality, Cooperation, and Environmental Sustainability," leading social scientists provide answers to this difficult question, using new research on the impact of inequality on environmental sustainability.

The contributors' findings suggest that inequality may exacerbate environmental problems by making it more difficult for individuals, groups, and nations to cooperate in the design and enforcement of measures to protect natural assets ranging from local commons to the global climate. But a more equal division of a given amount of income could speed the process of environmental degradation--for example, if the poor value the preservation of the environment less than the rich do, or if the consumption patterns of the poor entail proportionally greater environmental degradation than that of the rich. The contributors also find that the effect of inequality on cooperation and environmental sustainability depends critically on the economic and political institutions governing how people interact, and the technical nature of the environmental asset in question. The contributors focus on the local commons because many of the world's poorest depend on them for their livelihoods, and recent research has made great strides in showing how private incentives, group governance, and government policies might combine to protect these resources.

The recent economic rise of China and India has attracted a great deal of attention--and justifiably so. Together, the two countries account for one-fifth of the global economy and are projected to represent a full third of the world's income by 2025. Yet, many of the views regarding China and India's market reforms and high growth have been tendentious, exaggerated, or oversimplified. "Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay" scrutinizes the phenomenal rise of both nations, and demolishes the myths that have accumulated around the economic achievements of these two giants in the last quarter century. Exploring the challenges that both countries must overcome to become true leaders in the international economy, Pranab Bardhan looks beyond short-run macroeconomic issues to examine and compare China and India's major policy changes, political and economic structures, and current general performance.

Bardhan investigates the two countries' economic reforms, each nation's pattern and composition of growth, and the problems afflicting their agricultural, industrial, infrastructural, and financial sectors. He considers how these factors affect China and India's poverty, inequality, and environment, how political factors shape each country's pattern of burgeoning capitalism, and how significant poverty reduction in both countries is mainly due to domestic factors--not global integration, as most would believe. He shows how authoritarianism has distorted Chinese development while democratic governance in India has been marred by severe accountability failures.

Full of valuable insights, "Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay" provides a nuanced picture of China and India's complex political economy at a time of startling global reconfiguration and change.

"Each of the essays in this volume is a gem. Together, they present a compelling case for the proposition that a more egalitarian domestic policy in the advanced economies is essential to a morally decent form of globalization. While globalization, in the form of greater openness in international trade, offers new opportunities for the world's poor, it also threatens wages for less advantaged workers in the advanced economies. Defending those wages will require new policies of social insurance and redistribution: an egalitarianism suited to a newly global economy. This is a large political challenge. But if the advanced economies continue on their current path and fail to meet this challenge, political opposition to globalization is likely to grow. If it does, we will see renewed trade barriers. And those barriers may have disastrous consequences for the world's poor. What we have is, in short, a powerful and original defense of global solidarity."--Joshua Cohen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"This stellar volume by a Who's Who list of scholars demolishes the simplistic myths about globalization preventing egalitarian redistribution. It will be required reading for years to come for those who want to understand globalization and redistribution at a deeper level than the standard textbook platitudes."--William Easterly, Professor of Economics, New York University

"This timely volume offers a pioneering and comprehensive treatment of an important facet of globalization--its relation to economic redistribution. This is a topic motivating a lot of speculation, discussion, and research these days, so it is very useful to obtain an informed perspective on different viewpointsand what we know about their underpinnings. Each of this book's essays, by eminent scholars, represents a serious attempt to assemble theoretical and empirical arguments, using state-of-the-art methodology."--Dilip Mookherjee, Professor of Economics, Boston University, author of "The Crisis in Government Accountability"

"An outstanding contribution to the field. The authors analyze the impact of globalization in a refreshingly nuanced fashion."--John Stephens, Gerhard E. Lenski, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of "Development and Crisis of the Welfare State"

Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution of political and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an important element of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents a substantial reduction in the authority of national governments over economic policy. The contributors to Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries examine this institutional transformation from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, offering detailed case studies of decentralization in eight countries: Bolivia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Uganda.Some of these countries witnessed an unprecedented "big bang" shift toward comprehensive political and economic decentralization: Bolivia in 1995 and Indonesia after the fall of Suharto in 1998. Brazil and India decentralized in an uneven and more gradual manner. In some other countries (such as Pakistan) devolution represented an instrument for consolidation of power of a nondemocratic national government. In China local governments were granted much economic but little political power. South Africa made the transition from the undemocratic decentralization of apartheid to decentralization under a democratic constitution. The studies provide a comparative perspective on the political and economic context within which decentralization took place, and how this shaped its design and possible impact.Contributors: Omar Azfar, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Pranab Bardhan, Shubham Chaudhuri, Ali Cheema, Jean-Paul Faguet, Bert Hofman, Kai Kaiser, Philip E. Keefer, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Justin Yifu Lin, Mingxing Liu, Jeffrey Livingston, Patrick Meagher, Dilip Mookherjee, Ambar Narayan, Adnan Qadir, Ran Tao, Tara Vishwanath, Martin Wittenberg

Traditional development economics has recently been revolutionized by the application of new economic tools and concepts. Development Microeconomics is the first in a series of books which will look at the entire spectrum of development economics issues, combining the strengths of conventional developmental thought with the insights of contemporary mainstream economics. High technical sophistication is avoided, and the only pre-requisite is some familiarity with the tools of general microecomic theory at a first-year graduate or advanced undergraduate level.

This volume demonstrates that advanced economic theory provides tools which may usefully be applied to an understanding of the operation of institutions, in the case with particular and significant implications for the problems faced by poor agrarian economies. While many economist accept the institutions are of fundamental importance, this recognition has until recently rarely been matched by the application of rigorous analysis of their formation and behavior, tending rather to confine itself to descriptive studies.