An OECD for the Third World

SUMMARY Periodic resolution?passing conferences can educate, legitimize, set the stage for, and sometimes stimulate the process of detailed bargaining and consultation which alone can make progress towards improved international arrangements. The multiplicity of international forums dealing with related issues, and the manner in which pressures in one can generate counter?pressures in others, strengthens the need for a Third World OECD, a professional secretariat capable of developing strategies and tactics across the whole range of international economic issues, developing feasible sequences for reform?mongering efforts in the most appropriate forums. Care should be taken in designing the staffing and conditions of service of such a body to prevent it becoming just another tier of international bureaucracy RESUMEN Una OECD para el Tercer Mundo Sólo el proceso de negociación y consulta detalladas puede producir avances hacia mejores arreglos internacionales, pero las conferencias periódicas que adoptan resoluciones pueden educar, dar legitimidad al proceso, servirle de escenario y a veces estimularlo. La multiplicidad de foros internacionales que tratan problemas conexos y la forma en que las presiones en unos pueden generar contra?presiones en otros refuerza la necesidad de que haya una OECD del Tercer Mundo, un secretariado profesional capaz de formular estrategias y tácticas respecto de toda la problemática económica internacional, planteando secuencias factibles para promover reformas en los foros más apropiados. La contratación del personal y las condiciones de servicio en un organismo como ése deben ser concebidos con cuidado para evitar que pase a ser un escalón más de la burocracia internacional. RESUME Une OCDE au sein du tiers?monde Des conférences regulières, donnant lieu à des résolutions positives favorisent les négociations et consultations les plus propices à la réalisation de meilleures ententes internationales. D'innombrables réunions internationales traitant sans issue de problèmes analogues, n'engendrant que des séries de contrariétés, soulignent le besoin urgent d'une OCDE, savoir un secrétariat professionnel, compétent à élaborer des stratégies adaptées à l'ensemble des problèmes économiques internationaux et à militer, au sein de réunions appropriées, en faveur de réformes valables. Il faudrait veiller à ce que ce nouvel organisme ne tienne aucun trait de bureaucratie internationale

Entreprises transnationales, exportations de produits manufacturés et emploi dans les pays moins développés

This article is an abridged version of a document presented by the author at the World Conference on Employment held in Geneva in 1976. The study deals successively with the role of transnational enterprises in the production (and marketing) of exports to other LDC's and developed countries, the composition of these exports as well as their short and long-term effects on economic development, government revenues, employment and income. Outlining difficulties with which the LDC's will be confronted in their promotion of the export sector, the author puts forward several policy areas where active negotiations between developed countries and LDC's could lead to substantial improvement

1945’s Forgotten Insight: Multilateralism as Realist Necessity

The 70th anniversary of the signing and entry into force of the UN Charter provided an occasion to explore the historical underpinnings of contemporary global governance. This article redresses the neglect of the United Nations as a multilateral structure before the conference that drafted the Charter in 1945. It rehabilitates an underappreciated aspect of the period that began on January 1, 1942, with the “Declaration by United Nations,” namely, the combination of multilateral strategies for military and human security to achieve victory in war and peace. The wide substantive and geographic resonance suggests the extent to which the pressures of the second war to end all wars helped states to overcome their disinclination to collaborate. Today’s fashionable calls for “good enough” global governance abandon the strategy of constructing robust intergovernmental organizations; they are not good enough, especially, because our forebears did much better. Many insights and operational approaches from 1942 to 1945 remain valid for addressing twenty-first-century global challenges

Be outraged: there are alternatives

Pushed to extremes, austerity is bad economics, bad arithmetic, and ignores the lessons of history. We, an international group of economists and social scientists, are outraged at the narrow range of austerity policies which are bringing so many people around the world to their knees, especially in Europe. Austerity and cutbacks are reducing growth and worsening poverty. In our professional opinions, there are alternatives – for Britain, Europe and all countries that currently imagine that government cutbacks are the only way out of debt. The low-growth, no-growth trap means that the share of debt in GNP falls ever more slowly, if at all. It may even rise – as it has in some countries

Outsourcing Governance: States and the Politics of a ‘Global Value Chain World’

Politics, and by extension states, are marginal in debates about the genesis, evolution and functioning of the GVC-based global economy. We contend here that the core complexity of state agency and state power needs to be much more carefully understood in GVC and related debates, as a basis on which the governance of the evolving GVC world can be properly theorised as revolving around the inseparability of economic and political power. We advance a framework for understanding the role of politics and states in the construction and maintenance of a GVC world, using a three-fold typology of facilitative, regulatory and distributive forms of governance, and propose a notion of ‘outsourcing governance’ as an attempt to capture the ways in which states purposefully, through active political agency, have engaged in a process of delegating a variety of governance functions and authority to private actors. Our overarching argument is normative: ‘outsourced governance’ of the form we currently observe is associated with regressive distributional outcomes, and is antithetical to an inclusive and sustainable global economy