Product Description

Jeffrey Sachs draws on his remarkable 25 years’ experience to offer a thrilling and inspiring vision of the keys to economic success in the world today. Marrying vivid storytelling with acute analysis, he sets the stage by drawing a conceptual map of the world economy and explains why, over the past 200 years, wealth and poverty have diverged and evolved across the planet, and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the trap of poverty. Sachs tells the remarkable stories of his own work in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, China and Africa to bring readers with him to an understanding of the different problems countries face. In the end, readers will be left not with an understanding of how daunting the world’s problems are, but how solvable they are – and why making the effort is both our moral duty and in our own interests.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12615 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author
Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University as well as Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. He is internationally renowned for his work as economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa.

Customer Reviews

An Economic Messiah
Jeffrey Sach's book should be listed in the biographies and not in the economics section. Filled with generalisations and shortcuts and forwarded by an awestruck Bono, it fails to impress. Once one reaches the end of the book where the recipe to end poverty follows Dr. Sachs world travels, he/she will find the Gap Financing approach to development. The main idea is to indentify the national savings rate, the projected needed investment rate and fill the gap by aid. This pretty much has been the ineffectual method used since the end of WWII to address issues of underdevelopment. A quick survey of the literature (especially Easterly, 2001) can show its limitations. At least Dr. Sachs largely avoids presenting us too rudely with the usual neoliberal orthodoxy paraded by the World Bank and the IMF around the globe. Worth reading but probably not worth applying.

Development must-read
Broadly speaking, this is an excellent book, packed full with new insights, clear solutions and interesting case studies drawing on a wealth of experience Jeffrey Sachs has in the development economics field. The maps and graphs interspersed in the text were also a welcome addition - too few books use them to full effect.
My only complaints are that (a) at times it read like a bit like biography and (b) it is too short! Often my interest was sparked on a complex issue, only to have it dealt with in a very broad brush way.
In general, though, it is a definite must-read.

A leading economist explains how society can end poverty
This is an excellent book by one of today's most prominent development economists. Jeffrey D. Sachs has been at the forefront of the most significant economic turnarounds - for better or worse - of the past quarter century. He helped end hyperinflation in Bolivia, advised Poland on its emergence from communism, and counseled Russia, China and Africa. On the basis of his extensive research and experience, he concludes that conventional economic solutions ignore some of the key factors responsible for poverty. Borrowing a page from physicians' diagnostic procedures, he shows how noneconomic factors can have economic implications. Along the way, he exposes the lamentable hypocrisy of the developed world and the institutions allegedly working for the development of the poor world. As an adviser to the leadership of the United Nations, Sachs believes that organization should be strengthened. He is not a dispassionate economist and doesn't pretend to be. He has a plausible case to make and he presses it hard, maybe now and then too hard, in this effort to convince the prosperous that effective help for the impoverished is practical, at least under some circumstances. We believe his well informed, heartfelt book belongs on the reading list of anyone who hopes the world can become a better place.