In the last 30 years since the onset of the Chinese open economic reform program, the world has experienced profound systemic shifts, with arguably more in the past two centuries. Much of this change/transformation has had highly positive impacts. The misnamed “emerging economies,” many of which in fact are old civilizations with long histories of sustained and dynamic trading activities, have definitively ended the long period of exclusive Western global economic dominance. As the global market has expanded well beyond anyone’s imagination, the world, especially the developing world, has experienced unprecedented rates of growth. However, as Jean-François Rischard has argued in his compelling book High Noon: Twenty Global Problems – Twenty Years to Solve Them (2002), while markets and new information technologies experienced exponential change, the development of institutions and mentalities has been linear at best. This dissonance is at the origin of the gaping global governance gap that characterises the world today; it is well illustrated by the continued failure of the WTO Doha Round negotiations, extending over eight years-in fact, for virtually the whole of the 21st century to date! This is not an auspicious first decade to a new century.

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