Human-Centred International Economic Policy: Institutionalizing Inclusion, Sustainability and Resilience in International Economic Governance and Cooperation

This chapter presents an agenda for deep reform of international economic governance and cooperation based on the human-centred logic of placing the bottom-line measure of national economic progress, broad progress in living standards, rather than GDP growth at the heart of international macroeconomic policy cooperation; the international financial architecture; and international trade and technology governance. This twenty-first century renovation of the international economic architecture is based on a “Roosevelt Consensus” model of growth and development that emphasizes the social contract's crucial role in advancing inclusion, sustainability and resilience. Major reforms are proposed to IMF and World Bank macroeconomic policy analysis and advice, including debt sustainability methodology; and international development and climate finance, through the tripling of ODA-related external flows to more than 80 of the poorest countries in each of the next seven years, including for the purpose of retiring and replacing most of the world’s coal-fired power-generating capacity over the next 15 years while doubling global annual investment in renewable energy research and development. Additional proposals are made to rebalance international trade policy by coordinating trade, labour, climate change and development cooperation to a far greater extent through new types of international economic alliances, including one that could create a workable solution to the thorny issue of climate leakage, and giving the WTO a new lease on life facilitating discussions among plurilateral trade agreements and their members about how the best normative and facilitative features of such agreements could ultimately be knit together into a reconstituted, high-road multilateral trading system. Together, these reforms would greatly accelerate progress toward UN goals.