With the world's attention fixed on the travails of leading global economies due to a still unfolding financial crisis of gigantic proportions, there has been a studied silence on the fate of the third world as the malaise increasingly impacts it. This silence is particularly disturbing because questions of potential pitfalls in the neoliberal policy package, which the third world (unlike Western Europe and Japan) was largely forced to adopt, were never countenanced. as One third world state after another discovered that international institutions were in effect hostile to their governments if they chose alternative developmental models or otherwise resisted the neoliberal triage of liberalization, privatization and deregulation.

This collection is a tour de force, effectively countering not only the neoliberal ideology of development as a whole but the marginalizing within today's mainstream crisis discourse of any discussion of the monstrous misallocation of global resources wrought by the so-called Washington Consensus and the suffering and destruction it has wreaked on third world peoples and economies.

This edited volume is intended as both a textbook for introductory classes in global development or area studies and as a conduit for advanced students, policymakers, NGO activists and an educated readership to gain knowledge about the socio-economic conditions existing across much of the world we live in, and the policies that brought them about. The specially commissioned and peer reviewed chapters are written by experts in the fields of economics, politics, sociology and international studies. Chapter authors hail from around the world including: Brazil, Mexico, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand. The countries/regions neoliberal experience and potential futures covered in this book are: Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, Mexico, Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam), South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Thailand and Venezuela.