Constantine Michalopoulous, Aid, Trade and Development. 50 Years of Globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, ISBN 9783319658605)/Clair Gammage, North-South Regional Trade Agreements as Legal Regimes. A Critical Assessment of the EU-SADC Economic Partnership Agreement (Edward Elgar, 2017, ISBN 9781784719616)

Abstract

The post-World War II era has been marked by the multi-dimensional globalization, leading to the expansion and sophistication of political and economic interdependencies between the developed and developing countries. Not surprisingly, the expansion of global trade, investment and aid flows and the proliferation of respective international law and governance structures have been accompanied by intense policy and scholarly debate that, in turn, has been shaping crucial turns in the trade and aid policies of major powers. With an ambitious task to “trace the evolution of thinking and practice of developed and developing country policies on trade and foreign aid” over the period from the 1960s to modern days, Constantine Michalopoulous narrates it as a story of uncertainty, ambitious hypotheses, trials, errors, and the correction of mistakes. Interestingly, the author declines a strictly chronological approach in favour of looking at turning points in the history of development cooperation, such as the 1973 oil crisis, the debt crisis and the debates on debt relief in 1980s, the inception of the WTO, the challenge of aiding post-Soviet countries following the Union’s dissolution and the Greek crisis. While providing an in-depth account of ideas, shocks, and various actors’ policy reactions that shaped modern development economics, Michalopoulous, however, acknowledges the open-endedness of many conceptual economic questions, such as the interplay between trade liberalization and economic growth/poverty reduction, the redistributive effects of trade liberalization and the determination of aid effectiveness. As such, “Aid, Trade and Development” contributes to voluminous literature, directed to explaining the factors of development, by arguing that “both aid and trade can benefit development, but whether they actually do depends very much on coherent supportive policies in both developed and developing countries” (p. 4). More specifically, it falls within the research strand that studies the nexus between trade liberalization (market openness) and development (economic growth, poverty alleviation). Simultaneously resonating with the 1977 Brandt Commission’s Report “North-South: A Programme for Survival” and modern focus on policy coherence in the global governance for sustainable development, the contribution, however, does not touch upon the modern institutional and legal explanations of development (reflected inter alia in New Institutional Economics and governance paradigms of international development).