UN and Global Political Economy

John Toye is a political economist who has directed research on economic development at the Universities of Wales, Sussex, and Oxford. He has also worked as a British civil servant, as the director of a private consultancy company, and as a director of the United Nations Committee on Trade and Development. His previous books include Dilemmas of Development (2nd ed., 1993) and Keynes on Population (2000) and he has published numerous academic articles. Richard Toye is lecturer in history at Homerton College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Labour Party and the Planned Economy, 1931–1951 (2003) and co-author, with Jamie Miller, of Cripps versus Clayton (forthcoming).

• Foreword by Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly, and Thomas G. WeissAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. The UN Trade and Development Debates of the 1940s2. The UN Recruits Economists3. Michal Kalecki, the World Economic Report, and McCarthyism4. From Full Employment to Economic Development5. The Early Terms-of-Trade Controversy6. ECLA, Industrialization, and Inflation7. Competitive Coexistence and the Politics of Modernization8. The Birth of UNCTAD9. UNCTAD under Raúl Prebisch: Success or Failure?10. World Monetary Problems and the Challenge of Commodities11. The Conservative Counterrevolution of the 1980s12. What Lessons for the Future?Appendix: List of Archival SourcesNotesIndexAbout the AuthorsAbout the UN Intellectual History Project

"John Toye (British political economist) and Richard Toye (history, Cambridge Univ., UK), a father-son team, examine, as part of the United Nations Intellectual History Project, contributions to development economics by the UN and its specialized agencies. They acknowledge that, despite high aspirations by some for the UN to be the principal international organization to promote economic development, its status in the field of finance, development, and trade became ancillary to that of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, which operate independently within the UN framework. The authors explain why the UN became marginal (inter alia, the Cold War, excessive demands by Third World countries, the Latin American debt crisis, and financial resources of the IMF and World Bank). The research output of a number of prominent economists in the UN's employ, however, left a lasting legacy to the trade and development debate. The substance of the research produced by these economists (e.g., Michal Kalecki, Nicholas Kaldor) during their UN service, and the historical, political, and bureaucratic setting in which the research was performed, is clearly and informatively summarized. Of special interest to students of economic development and trade policy and policy makers in these areas. Summing Up: Recommended. Public, academic, and professional library collections."—C. J. Siegman, formerly, Federal Reserve Board/International Monetary Fund , 2004dec CHOICE