Growth is central to reducing poverty. While economics can identify some of the essential conditions for it, the recipes for ‘cooking’ these into a successful outcome differ across countries, and times, according to history and context. Therefore, observers (and donors) should not try to impose specific policies, but can identify the ‘contours’ of successful strategies through empirical analysis. Rodrik always writes well and uses clear economic analysis to illuminate how unconventional policies produce conventionally good outcomes, so the book is more interesting to read than this summary may imply. But this collection of his previously published chapters does not bring a new coherence to his arguments. 

The central inconsistency is that in the three chapters on trade his own strong view that policy freedom is more important than trade gains for all developing (and developed) countries triumphs over any willingness to allow developing countries to make their own choices. If their choice is different from his, it is because they "have let themselves be bam-boozled" (p 235). Stylistically, the problems are the usual ones of such collections: repetition and some now out-of-date examples. (For example Vietnam, which has joined the WTO to get the regulatory benefits of membership, is quoted as an example of a country outside it succeeding because it can apply non-WTO policies.)

The chapters on industrial policy and the nature and role of institutions are good, in spite of Rodrik’s tendency to overstate his case (for example on the limits of what trade can do or the ease of finding competent institutions), but seem more appropriate to a newspaper article than, as here, mixed with theory and algebra. He insists on the validity of the central ‘ingredients’ from economics: property rights, sound money, fiscal solvency, and market incentives, but shows how countries can embed them in different types of institution according to their own circumstances. He argues that growth is relatively easy to start (although his chapter on how to identify the binding constraints to growth is too descriptive to provide much guidance), and that the more difficult problem is to build institutions that can maintain it. The public and private sectors must collaborate, but not be too close. He describes the costs and benefits of copying institutions by blueprint or developing them from scratch. For both, there is little guidance on how to choose the path between these extremes. His examples are mainly from Latin America and East Asia; they are fewer and weaker for Africa. 

Rodrik follows the US and Canadian literature in emphasising that there are still high costs to trade and financing across borders, and uses this to support his argument that the gains from either liberalising their own markets or improving access to those of others are worth less to developing countries than they lose by accepting restrictions on policies for investment or intellectual property. Here, he quotes average gains for all developing countries, and treats both the large gains for some countries and their own choice of negotiating objectives as unimportant. There is no discussion of the potential impact of his proposals for weaker disciplines in the WTO on trade among developing countries, or of how to impose such changes without violating his support for democracy. He also argues that countries should keep the freedom to restrict trade to protect their own labour and environmental policies. Yet his view that Brazil, China, and India should support allowing the EU to keep the CAP because it ‘protects domestic social arrangements’ (p 227) may be equally surprising to them and to European readers.