Winner Take All by Dambisa Moyo [Book Review]

The emergence of China as a major economic and political power is perhaps the most important development in the global system since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While this change is sometimes manifested through  the launch of China’s first aircraft carrier, other expressions of this change are more subtle, though just as large in scale. Winner Take All, the latest book by Dambisa Moyo, the celebrity author of Dead Aid and How the West was Lost, describes another unrealized consequence with potentially huge implications.

Winner Take All opens with the Chinese purchase of an entire Peruvian mountain or, “more specifically, [the purchase of] the mineral rights to mine the resources contained in it.” Moyo sees this purchase and others like it as part of a cohesive resource policy, involving a combination of large-scale resource stockpiling,sourcing from the developing world through direct investment at the source, long-term agreements with state-owned resource companies and purchases on the open market.

This is an excerpt from a review of Winner Take All by Dambisa Moyo, originally published in the Asian Review of Books on August 3rd, 2012. The full review can be accessed here.