Foreword

At a time when official development assistance is in deep crisis, partly as a result of the relative decline in geopolitical motivation since the fall of the Berlin wall, the concept of global public goods provides development cooperation with new avenues for analysis and action.

This economic concept is a response to the imbalances at world level revealed by analysis of the globalisation of production and trade, long since identified by economic theory at the national level. At neither level can the market provide enough of the goods and services necessary for the activity and well-being of all social actors.

These market failures are remedied in various ways by the regulatory functions of the State. The global public goods approach proposes to implement, on a world scale, policies aimed at correcting market deficiencies and at securing for all actors in the global economy access to such public goods as environmental quality, peace and security, or again protection against major endemic diseases, or the stable functioning of international financial systems.

The definition of these global public goods is a matter for debate, a debate that ought to continue until consensus has been reached, failing which it is impossible to imagine a concerted international policy approach. [...]

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