Gallagher Publishes OpEd in FT on Multilateral System Crisis
Kevin Gallagher, Director of the Global Development Policy (GDP) Center and Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, co-wrote a recent Op-Ed on the current crisis facing the multilateral system.
Gallagher’s Op-Ed, entitled “Crocodile Capitalism and the Multilateral System Crisis,” was published in Financial Times on April 10, 2019. Gallagher co-wrote the Op-Ed with Richard Kozul-Wright, Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
From the text of the Op-Ed:
If there is agreement on anything during these turbulent and polarising times, it is that the multilateral system is in crisis. As world financial leaders convene in Washington this week — the heart of the beast that threatens the system most — they should begin to articulate the case and basis for a new multilateralism for stability and shared prosperity.
A realisation that the system constructed at Bretton Woods in 1944 was not delivering on its promises came into sharp focus with the global financial crisis. It has been reaffirmed since at voting booths in the UK, the US and across the developing world and is trickling up to the pages of the Financial Times and official statements of large multilateral institutions.
Indeed, this week the Inter-Agency Task for Financing for Development — a collaboration of more than 60 agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and a host of United Nations agencies — collectively acknowledged that, while the multilateral system of trade, investment and finance has brought some benefit, the “uneven distribution of the benefits has left many behind and undermined support for the global architecture”.
Multilateralism once promised a value-driven and rules-based international economic order, tasked with promoting co-ordinated actions to deliver shared prosperity and mitigate common risks. The now forgotten foundations of the Bretton Woods institutions laid down after the second world war sought to regulate capital and expand global trade to promote full employment and prosperity.
Gallagher serves on the United Nations’ Committee for Development Policy and co-chairs the T-20 Task Force on International Financial Architecture at the G-20. He previously served on the investment sub-committee of the Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy at the US Department of State and on the National Advisory Committee at the Environmental Protection Agency. Gallagher has been a visiting or adjunct professor at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico; Tsinghua University in China, and the Center for State and Society in Argentina. @KevinPGallagher