The Debt Threat: How Debt Is Destroying the Developing World...and Threatening Us All - Softcover

Hertz, Noreena

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060560568 ISBN 13: 9780060560560

Publisher: Harper Business, 2006

Synopsis

Noreena Hertz, one of the world's leading experts on economic globalization, looks at the history of third-world debt and its crippling effects on people in developing countries.

Drawing from her impressive debt-relief campaign, fact-finding travels, and meetings with top-ranking officials, Hertz offers a probing analysis of the origins of this rampant burden and its evolution through the decades. With clear principles of justice, she uncovers the imbalance of power and misuse of corrupt dictators and reckless lenders.

About this title

About the Author:

Noreena Hertz is a bestselling author, academic, and thinker. She has provided keynote addresses at TED and the World Economic Forum, sits on the board of Warner Music Group, and advises a range of major corporations. She is an honorary professor at the Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty at University College London.

From Publishers Weekly:

The debt of poor countries causes terrorism, argues economist Hertz in this follow-up to The Silent Takeover. The first nine chapters give considerable anecdotal evidence of poverty, injustice and disease but fail to link them to indebtedness. Assuming that money borrowed by poor governments is stolen by elites, and that repayment comes from cutting social services to the poor, Hertz compares health-care budgets of countries to their debt service payments. The chapters fail to distinguish among types of debt: direct and indirect, internal and external, infrastructure and export financing, for example. Horror stories from the 1940s to the 1990s are mixed indiscriminately. Chapter 10 is the first mention of the terrorism link; the argument turns out to be little more than that misery causes terrorism. The following chapter is the first part that draws on Hertz's full strengths as an economist, where debt "is very complex stuff, conceptually and politically, and it takes us into difficult, alien terrain." She navigates this terrain with precision and clarity, presenting inspiring visions for change. Her blueprint for development has little to do with debt, and nothing to do with terrorism, but it's the reason to buy this book.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0060560568
• ISBN 13: 9780060560560
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272