The average European cow gets a subsidy of £1.20 a day, more than is earned by half the people in the developing world. For much of that world, globalisation seems like a pact with the devil, according to Joseph Stiglitz, and he should know: he was chief economist at the World Bank after a stint as adviser to President Bill Clinton and won the Nobel prize for economics in 2001.

In a new book, the rotund, benign 63-year-old Columbia University professor says the problem is not globalisation itself, but the way it has been managed. He regards the system as a relic of the cold war in which dominant countries pursued their own economic agenda in the battle for hearts and minds.

“Globalisation was to bring unprecedented prosperity to all,” he says. Instead, it “succeeded in unifying people from around the world — against globalisation”.

But globalisation is here to stay and even long-time critics such as Stiglitz, installed as chairman of the new Brooks World Poverty Institute at Manchester University earlier this year, are coming to realise that it’s how it develops that matters. If it is possible to influence such things, that is. You wonder what place fairness has in the law of the jungle.

“The goal is not to make a garden of Eden out of the jungle but something that makes things better,” he replies. “You expect the largest to get the lion’s share of the game, but you don’t necessarily expect in a democratic system that they would leave the poorest worst off. That is what has happened.”

Will China play fair when it gets in the driving seat? All the more reason to act now, he says. He has a cunning plan to force America to clean up its act — a common global tax on carbon emissions. This would allow Japan and Europe to claim that America’s failure to pay for its energy costs is tantamount to an unfair trade advantage or subsidy and bring a case before the World Trade Organisation.

Closer to home, millions of Britons feel that as much has been lost as gained through globalisation and that the true price of buying £4 jeans comes in the shape of mass migration from eastern Europe and a sense of eroded cultural identity. What does Stiglitz have to say to them?

“They enormously enjoy the goods they buy at low prices as a result of globalisation. And their standard of living would not be able to be sustained without globalisation,” he says.

Yet we still feel guilty about those cheap jeans — and the T-shirts, trousers and so on, piled up in the newly trendy “thrift” fashion shops — suspecting that they were made by workers, possibly even children, paid a pittance for their pains.

Over that, at least, we can breathe a small sigh of relief. “There has been some progress,” Stiglitz reports. “Governments in the West had to pass legislation to ensure that employers treated their workers well. The excuse, ‘We didn’t know, we just subcontract’, no longer works.”

The economist J K Galbraith observed in his book The Affluent Society in 1958 that chasing economic growth does not necessarily make people’s lives better. It’s a lesson usually learnt the hard way by rural migrants who abandon the support network of extended families for a worse quality of life in towns.

Should we encourage such people to become fodder for globalisation? “Institutions like the International Monetary Fund were not as sensitive to these concerns as they should have been,” Stiglitz says. “They thought it was a simple process in which everyone was going to be better off.

“What we see now in China is very interesting. They focused on urban development and discovered that meanwhile the standards of healthcare and education had deteriorated in rural areas. Incomes might be going up, but overall standards of living might be going down.”

Stiglitz has nothing but praise for Britain’s leading role in urging a fair deal for developing countries. “There is a growing awareness in Britain about the importance of this issue and your political leaders are reflecting a broader sentiment in society,” he says.

Yet some people grumble that the passionate grandstanding of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown on Third World issues such as debt relief has not been matched by their actions over Britain’s pensions crisis, illiteracy and other pressing national ills. “That may be true,” Stiglitz concedes, “but they represent an important cross-section of a part of British society. It raises the question: does charity begin at home? My view is that we need to do both.”

Making Globalisation Work by Joseph Stiglitz is published by Penguin