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  • A Forward-looking Agenda for Global Trade Governance and Sustainable Development from a Southern Perspective

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    March 23, 2009 /  climate change, financial crisis, G20, trade, wto

    Guest blogger Yash Tandon sets out a forward-looking agenda for global trade governance and sustainable development from a Southern perspective.

    The world’s multilateral negotiations on trade and on sustainable development over the last decade yield two important lessons for the multilateral system.

    The first lesson concerns the interconnectedness of things: trade, security, employment, human rights, development, terrorism, migration, poverty, climate change are all interconnected. For the developing countries of the South, trade and climate change are a dual facet of their continuing sustainable development challenges.

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  • The Demand for Global Governance: Containing the Spread of the Financial Crisis to the Trade Sector

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    March 20, 2009 /  financial crisis, G20, trade, wto

    Guest blogger Richard Higgott sets out the challenges and priorities for G-20 leaders to contain the spread of the financial crisis to the trade sector.

    The governance of global trade and the international trade regime will clearly be affected by the fallout from the current wider economic and financial turmoil. Enhanced global economic policy coordination is needed. Existing institutions do not currently offer enough – in either sufficient quantity or quality. Amidst efforts to stabilise the global economy, the multilateral trade system is threatened by the perception that globalization has been tarnished by speculative investment and other excesses in financial markets seeking ever larger profits at the expense of sound business practice.

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  • The Global Economic Crisis, Murky Protectionism, and Developing Countries

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    March 20, 2009 /  G20, trade, wto

    Even though the global economic crisis is far from over and may unfold in hitherto unexpected ways, the interests of developing countries, especially as they relate to the multilateral trading system, have definitely been implicated in ways that ought to force a rethink of national priorities. The purpose of this note is to identify a number of matters where crisis-related considerations should alter national calculations.

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  • The G20 Agenda, Trade and the Developing World

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    March 20, 2009 /  G20, trade, wto

    Bold trade and financial initiatives will be required to control the damage that the current crisis imposes on developing countries and to assure their economic recovery. At the highest level, the G20 will need to consolidate its position as a forum where substantive coordinating efforts can take place. A positive, concrete, action agenda needs to replace the emphasis on declarations of principle and the reassertion of willingness to cooperate. In addition to these efforts to provide substance to the agenda, two political challenges must be faced. The first is how to consolidate in developed countries a view that the enhanced role of the G20 over that of the G8 should become a permanent feature of global economic governance rather than a stop gap maintained only during the crisis. The second, similarly daunting challenge, is one of ensuring that developing countries are convinced that their interests are adequately represented by the developing countries that are G20 members.

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  • A New Mandate for Monitoring in the Global Trade System

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    March 20, 2009 /  G20, trade, wto

    Trade is one of the first casualties of a global economic crisis. We saw this happen during the Great Depression, after the oil shocks of the 1970s, in the early 1980s, and now the first contraction in global trade since 1982. A reformed and robust trade monitoring system should be among the top priorities for world leaders meeting in London in April and beyond. Many argue that the priority for governments should be to ‘fix’ the crisis first; reforming the governance of the global trade (and financial) system could come later. That would indeed be a mistaken strategy and a lost opportunity. It would be mistaken because better trade monitoring could determine the difference between a coordinated response and a deepening crisis. It would be a lost opportunity for reform because the current crisis sharply exposes the deficiencies in trade governance, which if tolerated any longer would only serve to delegitimise a rule-based trade system.

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  • Resist US Protectionism: The Top Trade Priority for the G20

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    March 20, 2009 /  G20, trade, wto

    The motto of the G20 leader’s forthcoming London Summit is “Stability Growth Jobs.” The world economy is producing an insufficient amount of all three of these economic virtues and so it is appropriate for powerful governments to get together in London to try to improve and coordinate their social, economic, and environmental policies.

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  • Globalization’s Systemic Shifts and Seismic Shocks: Perspectives for Developing Countries to 2015

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    March 20, 2009 /  G20, trade, wto

    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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  • Trade Policy Challenges After the Food, Fuel and Financial Crises

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    March 17, 2009 /  G20, trade, world bank, wto

    The recent food, fuel and financial crises have imposed large external shocks on households and firms in all developing countries. They have prompted questioning of the risks and rewards of globalization and identified areas where the global governance of trade urgently needs improvement. (Here, I broadly define good global trade governance as international cooperation in the form of a set of agreed rules that reduce the negative spillovers of national policies affecting international flows of products and production factors.) At the same time, the financial crisis has revealed the robustness and importance of the trading system. A major feature of the current crisis is the dog that did not bark: that is, to date, we have not seen the widespread imposition of the types of trade protection that characterized the 1970s and early 1980s, not to mention the 1930s.

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  • A Forward-looking Agenda for Global Economic Governance: Trade, Climate, and Inequality

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    March 17, 2009 /  climate change, financial crisis, G20, imf, trade, world bank, wto

    The most critical challenge for global economic governance is to find effective and fair ways of mitigating and adapting to climate change whilst at the same time reducing global income inequalities and realizing the development aspirations and unrealized human potential of millions of people in developing countries. Recent evidence, for example on sea level rise and the shrinking summer ice in the Arctic Ocean, suggests that climate change is occurring even faster than models pronounced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have predicted. Biophysical feedback mechanisms, too often omitted from climate models, are likely to be a key factor in the underestimation and are likely to make climate change irreversible once critical atmospheric temperatures are passed. How fast we act will affect both the magnitude and reversibility of climate change. Some say 2015 will be too late; but even if they are wrong, the climate issue will certainly be at the top of the public agenda by then.

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  • A Trade Agenda for the G-20: The MDGs and Deficits in Global Governance

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    March 9, 2009 /  aid, financial crisis, G20, trade, wto

    Since the Millennium Development Goals were agreed in 2000, many developing countries have made great strides. The world was on track to achieve at least the first Millennium Goal of halving the number of extreme poor, and it was coming close to reaching several other objectives as well. But the present crisis is wiping out that hard fought progress. Poor countries’ access to credit has been reduced, resulting in slower investment and growth; already pitiful overseas development assistance (ODA) levels are falling; and Africa might be robbed of its one chance in a generation to make real progress. In the meantime, the world lacks an effective system of global governance. The three deficits in the system I elaborate below have hampered the structure in the past, but they are especially crippling in the present situation.

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