September and October are shaping up to be hard months in a precarious year. A meltdown in financial, credit, and housing markets. The continuing stress of high food and fuel prices and the dangers for poverty and malnutrition. Anxieties about the global economy.
The events of September and October could be a tipping point for many developing countries. As always, the poor are the most defenseless. Voices around the world are blaming free markets. Others are asking about the failures of government institutions. We cannot turn back the clock on globalization. So we must learn the lessons from the past, as we build for the future. We must modernize multilateralism and markets for a changing world economy.
Today's globalization and markets reflect huge changes in information and communications technology, financial and trade flows, mobility of labor, worldwide interconnectivity and vast new competitive forces. New economic powers are on the rise, making them stakeholders in the global system. These rising powers want to be heard.
Private financial markets and businesses will continue to be the strongest drivers of global growth and development. But the developed world's financial systems, especially in the United States, have revealed glaring weaknesses after suffering titanic losses. The international architecture designed to deal with such circumstances is creaking.
The New Multilateralism, suiting our times, will need to be a flexible network, not fixed. It needs to maximize the strengths of interconnecting and institutions, public and private. It should be oriented around pragmatic problem solving that fosters a culture of cooperation.
Our new multilateralism must build a sense of shared responsibility for the health of the global political economy and must involve those with a major stake in that economy. We must redefine economic multilateralism more broadly, beyond the traditional focus on finance and trade.
Today, energy, climate change, and stabilizing fragile and post-conflict states are economic issues. They are already part of the international security and environmental dialogue. They must be the concern of economic multilateralism as well.
