Putting Development First: The Importance of Policy Space in the WTO and International Financial Institutions

Some of the world’s most prominent development thinkers address the following question in this volume: to what extent are the rules and economic forces that govern the global economy shrinking the ‘policy space’ that developing countries can draw from in order to construct policies to raise the standards of living of their people? They then analyse the possibly considerable room for manoeuvre that developing countries still have at their disposal despite global macro-economic realities, IMF/World Bank policies, and the trade rules regime of the World Trade Organization. Finally, the authors suggest actual policies that could be put in place in order to preserve existing spaces for development and to expand the tools developing countries can deploy.