Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in Developing Countries: Who Really Gets Hurt? Nita Rudra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 314 pp., $90 cloth, $30 paper.

Nita Rudra's insightful study explores the effects of globalization on poverty and distribution in developing countries, with a focus on domestic welfare systems. Rudra challenges persistent commonplaces in the study of globalization, in particular the idea that looser restrictions on trade and capital generate a so-called race to the bottom, in which the poorer members of poorer societies are likeliest to suffer. While she acknowledges the existence of a race to the bottom, she argues that the globalization literature has misidentified its principal victims in the developing world. Contrary to the usual intuition, those who really get hurt are not the poor but the middle classes, who suffer through the steady erosion of their welfare privileges. The poor, meanwhile, whose suffering was often widely ignored by the welfare systems established during and after colonial rule, have comparatively less to lose.

For Rudra, the traditional application of the race to the bottom conception to developing countries has been a too-hasty jump from observations of the effects of globalization on OECD countries. The organized labor institutions that counterbalance the erosion of the welfare state in rich nations are absent elsewhere. At the same time, globalization affects developing countries unevenly. Rudra claims that those welfare systems that do exist in less developed countries are so diverse that globalization's effects should be regarded as difficult to generalize. Case studies of India, Brazil, and Korea serve as the cornerstones for a typology of developing country distribution regimes. It is acknowledgment of these different types of welfare states that ultimately helps us to understand the of globalization on these societies.

With its application of sophisticated statistical methodologies, this book presents a complex argument that will inform further study of the relationship between economic globalization, development, and issues of distributive justice (domestic and global). Its significant conclusions about the sociology of globalization have wide-ranging implications for democratization and development strategies.