Description
Book SynopsisThe research described in this book suggests that a properly designed and sufficiently massive economic development assistance project—a Global Marshall Plan—could tremendously reduce the economic gap between the richest and poorest nations within a 50-year planning period.
Trade ReviewJames Yunker’s Global Marshall Plan: Theory and Evidence is an important book because the world urgently needs new ideas. The original Marshall Plan worked wonders in Europe after World War II. Although the global situation is different in many respects from the situation back then, a Global Marshall Plan is perhaps our best option for coping with global economic inequality, a problem which the world community has thus far failed to address effectively. Based on a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis, Yunker makes a convincing case for trying out that option. -- F.J. Radermacher, University of Ulm, Germany
The scale of world inequality—within, across, and between nations, genders, and other social groups—is staggering. Unchecked, its onward march harbors the kind of social and political instability few have yet to comprehend. Yet, in much the same way we have done when it comes to tackling the other great ills of our time—war, environmental catastrophe, human insecurity, health pandemics, among others—we have eschewed serious, imaginative, and innovative thinking about how to improve, in more than a marginal way, the lived experiences of much of the world’s population. That we can no longer sit on our hands while Rome proverbially burns has been made clear by many. James Yunker is one of the very few brave enough to take world changing ideas seriously, explore their potential, examine their application, and show their capacity to make a dramatic difference to the world in which we live. Brave, passionate, compelling, Yunker’s Global Marshall Plan: Theory and Evidence is essential reading for all. -- Rorden Wilkinson, University of Sussex, University of Manchester
Table of ContentsContents 1. Global Economic Inequality 1 Is It a Problem? 5 Outline of the Study 20 2. Foreign Aid: History and Evaluation 34 Six Decades of Foreign Aid 38 Research on Foreign Aid 51 Viewpoints on Foreign Aid 59 GMP Aspirations 66 3. A Global Marshall Plan Model 77 Theoretical Specification 80 Numerical Implementation 87 Validation of the Model 97 Appendix: Nations in the World Bank Dataset 105 4. Application of the GMP Model 110 Benchmark Policy Simulation 113 Burden of the GMP 125 Sensitivity Analysis 130 5. Summary and Conclusion 140 Evaluating the Research 145 The Implementation Issue 160 Why a GMP? 163 Notes 171 Index 186
