Perkins, John. Confessions of an economic hit man. New York: Penguin Group, 2006 (originally published in 2004 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers). ISBN 0-452-28708-1.

Summary: One common pattern of economic imperialism is for agencies that sponsor international development, such as the World Bank, to require the governments of poor countries, as a condition of receiving economic support, to spend most of the money they receive on projects that benefit mainly the multinational corporations that execute them and subsequently control the resources that they produce. This is the autobiography of an agent of economic imperialism who devoted most of his early career to suckering third-world countries into counterproductive projects that transferred wealth, resources, and power from the poor to the rich.

He repeatedly calls his book a confession and speaks of his achievements as frauds, even as crimes. He wrote it in the hope of assuaging his guilt. Like many confessions, it reveals a residual narcissism and evasiveness that would be edited out of a third-person account. But it works fairly well as an exposé, because he worked closely with some of the people that he helped to exploit and can tell the story of their misery in a personal and human way.