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Providing global public goods : managing globalization

Elaborating on the concepts first introduced in Global Public Goods, this book addresses the long overdue issue of how to adjust the concept of public goods to todays economic and political realities. The production of global public goods requires the orchestration of initiatives by a large number of diverse actors across different levels and sectors. It may require the collaboration of governments, business and civil society, and in most cases it almost certainly calls for an effective linkage of the local, national, regional, and global levels. In light of todays new realities, this book examines a series of managerial and political challenges that pertain to the design and implementation of production strategies and the monitoring and evaluation of global public goods provision.As participatory decision-making enhances the political support for - and thus the effectiveness of - certain policy decisions, this volume offers suggestions on a number of pragmatic policy reforms for bringing the global public more into public policy making on global issues. Nine case studies examine the importance of the global public good concept from the viewpoint of developing countries, exploring how and where the concerns of the poor and the rich overlap.Providing Global Public Goods offers important and timely suggestions on how to move in a more feasible and systematic way towards a fairer process of globalization that works in the interests of all. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0195157400/toc.html

The Asymmetric Impact of Growth Fluctuation on Human Development: Evidence from Correlates of Growth Decelerations and Accelerations

This paper studies the impact of growth fluctuation on human development indicators using country level panel data between 1980 and 2009. The evidence from mean comparison and regression analysis suggests that, globally and on average, periods of decelerating economic growth are correlated with worse indicators of health and education outcomes and that the reverse happens for periods of growth accelerations. However, in line with the findings from the literature, these effects are asymmetric: things do not improve as much during good times as they worsen during bad times. And the negative effects of growth collapses are severe for developing countries, especially for Least Developed Countries, along with little or no improvement during good times.

Human Development in Crisis: Insights from the Literature, Emerging Accounts from the Field, and the Correlates of Growth Accelerations and Decelerations

Is a dramatic slowdown in global economic growth going to erase much of the progress in the last decade in terms of human development in the developing world‘ How might the crisis affect progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals‘ To address these questions, this paper contributes in three ways. First, it briefly reviews the empirical literature and outlines the possible transmission of the crisis from the broader global economy to the national economy, and eventually to households, children and women. Second, it summarizes some of the emerging accounts from the field based on reports and interviews of poor people, suggesting that households - and in particular children and women - face severe strain as the crisis has begun to unfold. A third contribution is an empirical analysis of the historical relationship between episodes of growth accelerations and decelerations with country level aggregate indicators of human development (e.g. life expectancy, infant and under-5 mortality and school enrollment), using data covering the period between 1980 and 2006. This paper argues that if the current economic crisis deteriorates into a severe growth deceleration episode, and if its adverse effects are not contra veiled by an adequate policy response, the accumulated evidence suggests that the crisis could begin to erode human development gains and that the achievement of the MDGs by 2015 is likely to be undermined.