The Ends and the Means of Development

In pursuing meaningful sustainable development, and investing in conservation and redressing the environmental damage caused by decades of neglect, we need to better explore and understand the role of international cooperation and why human values and ethics are central to this debate. International cooperation . A key ingredient for generating a sustainable development path will have to be a significant strengthening of the current mechanisms of international cooperation, which have turned out to be insufficient to meet the global challenges that we face. The process of globalization is unfolding in the absence of equivalent international institutions to support it and harness its potential for good. There is no global environmental authority, for instance. Policy on the climate change front is being done via ad-hoc approaches involving elements of international cooperation, voluntary compliance, and large doses of hope. In the absence of a body having jurisdi...

I’ve suggested recently that although high economic growth in recent decades has greatly improved average life expectancy, infant mortality, and other leading indicators policymakers and development practitioners were still worried about the sustainability of these trends and whether people in developing countries would eventually enjoy the high standards of living of high-income countries. This, against the background of a planet under increasing stress, particularly as a result of climate change. In this blog, I explore some of the actions needed to sustain our global economy. Climate change risks. A key finding of the latest scientific work on climate change is that the annual cost of introducing control measures for greenhouse gases is far smaller than the potential cost of uncontrolled climate change. Duly aware of the margins of uncertainty associated with such calculations, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has, in the past, p...

Global development as a universal objective to improve people’s social and economic wellbeing is a relatively recent concept. It was first embodied in the United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco 71 years ago this week, which stated: “the United Nations shall promote higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development.” In time, at least among practicing economists in academia and policymakers in government, “development” came to be seen as improved economic opportunity through the accumulation of capital and rising productivity. The implicit assumption here was that economic growth would lead to rising living standards, increases in life expectancy, reduced mortality, and a reduction in the incidence of poverty. And so, between 1950 and 2014, as world GDP per capita expanded at an annual average rate of 2.1 percent, this trend was associated with a remarkable evolution in three key indicators of...

Since the vast majority of the problems which humanity faces today are global in nature, the world needs more, not less international cooperation. Major planetary issues are being neglected—we are failing massively and risking being overwhelmed by a broad range of problems the solutions to which require effective “problem solving” mechanisms and institutions. The list of inherently global issues that are insoluble outside a framework of global collective action involving most nations of the world is long and includes: climate change, biodiversity loss, the depletion of tropical forests and fisheries, nuclear proliferation, widening income disparities, a flawed global financial architecture, illegal drugs, the rise of terrorism and the still high levels of poverty and deprivation afflicting much of the developing world, to name a few. Against this background, those who argue that the United Kingdom would be better off outside the EU do not seem to understand the extent to whic...