FINANCING DEVELOPMENT The G8 and UN Contribution Michele Fratianni, John J. Kirton, and Paolo Savona, editors Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 321pp, US $99.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0754646761)Anyone who aims to assemble an overview of development finance - an enormous subject - faces daunting challenges. One must examine problems from the perspectives of both the governments and organizations doing the lending and setting policy and of those on the ground who receive and spend the money. One has to confront both global trends and geographically narrow local realities. Financing Development: The G8 and UN Contribution attempts to navigate these treacherous waters, focusing on questions from the top down and offering recommendations for government policy, largely neglecting the role of grass-roots nongovernmental organizations in the development process. And while many contributors suggest that the status quo needs to change, most merely recommend rejigging reporting frameworks and increasing government-to-government communication.Trade reform receives close attention. Myles Wickstead, George von Furstenberg, Sheila Page, Sylvia Ostry, and Robert Fauver argue that increasing market access for third-world agricultural products can be as important to development as multilateral aid. As Fauver puts it, nothing can stimulate development as much as participation in the global trading system (237). This participation must include special and differential treatment within the context of the Uruguay WTO round and the Doha development round. Underlining this point, Princeton Lyman argues that treating as an object of charity, rather than a potential partner, does no service to Africa (126). While the contributors do not suggest that trade reform is a panacea, they convincingly demonstrate that the opening of European and American markets will encourage African governments to reform their trading policies and help to attract needed foreign investment.Students of governance will especially enjoy the critical examination of the effects that the G8, Commonwealth, and Francophonie have had on African governance. At times, G8 development efforts have contributed to corruption (for instance when aid officers turn a blind eye to local officials' overseas caches of stolen funds). As a solution to this problem, Ade Afuye suggests that the G8 establish a mechanism to investigate the track records of companies competing for development contracts (150).Wickstead's review of the UK's Commission for is one of the book's highlights. His review of the commission's history, governance, and conclusions is masterful, and lends weight to his insistence that the G8 and the UN must complete the unfinished business of the commission's recommendations on aid, debt, and trade (138).Von Furstenberg challenges many of the recommendations that Jeffrey Sachs advanced in his popular book The End of Poverty. He argues that G8 and UN aid should travel through national institutions instead of, as Sachs argues, bypassing them. …