Gordon Brown’s Seven Ways to Change the World-To ease the heavy blow of globalization

Gordon Brown’s Seven Ways to Change the World-To ease the heavy blow of globalization

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In Gordon Brown’s life, he witnessed great changes in the world. The boundaries of finance, trade and communications have been opened. For some people, huge opportunities have already arisen. But for others, globalization has removed the barriers to protecting their safety, wages, and well-being. The result was a disagreement, and now Covid-19 has deepened the disagreement.

The dilemma of globalization is the core Seven ways to change the world, It joins an ever-expanding library of works, provides answers to questions in the global system, and describes the path to a better, post-pandemic future.

Brown’s reflection on this is very important. As a politician, the former British Prime Minister has been trying to figure out how to take advantage of the benefits of globalization and manage risks since the 1980s. Unleashing global finance has brought cheaper mortgages, but it has also brought about a financial crisis. Freer trade may bring cheaper food, but local farmers are bankrupt-who do you believe will supervise overseas suppliers?

In the 1990s, many centrist politicians believed that globalization at full speed could be managed through a combination of stronger global governance and generous aid to help the poorest countries compete. This is clearly still the core of Brown’s view. His book emphasizes the challenge.

Among them, he called for more funding for development, including the “Marshall Plan for Africa.” Recall that starting in 1997, Brown was part of the Labor government. The government changed British aid, adopted a spending target of 0.7% of GDP, and created an independent aid agency. But under the leadership of Boris Johnson, the current Conservative government suspended aid pledges and merged the Department of International Development (DfID) with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

After the recent G7 summit, Brown described the resulting vaccine promise as “a Unforgivable moral failureObviously, in the current climate, his proposal of providing more agreed funds for health, education, achieving net zero carbon emissions and sustainable development goals will be difficult to achieve.

Just as important as this book is the reform of global governance. In several of the seven ways Brown has changed the world (divided into seven chapters), he brings together the ideas he has been constructing since the late 1990s. Reforming the International Monetary Fund to establish a financial early warning system echoed the changes he demanded after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Similarly, he called for the adoption of the United Nations tax treaty to ensure fairer taxation, and to strengthen the cooperation between the United Nations and the World Bank to advance the sustainable development goals, which echoes the arguments made by Brown at the turn of the century.

In response to the pandemic, Brown advocated strengthening the World Health Organization and formulating a “burden sharing formula” for global health contributions. This formula reminds me of a formula created nearly 80 years ago to distribute donations (and votes) to the IMF. Then a lot of political realism ensures that the United States becomes the leading role of global institutions. This is essential to ensure that the United States agrees to participate.

The Brown’s formula for global health contributions calculates 27% for the United States and 13% for China (6% for the United Kingdom), and is supported by the chapter on US-China cooperation, which reflects this for the world’s two largest superpowers , A practical cooperation on an item-by-item basis may be the best way forward.

The problem is that compared with the speed of globalization, progress in reforming international institutions has been slow. As he pointed out, about 23 years after he proposed the global tax reform in the G7, the United States announced its support for the global minimum tax system for the first time. Brown believes that this is not enough. This highlights the challenge.

This is not a self-congratulation book. If anything, Brown downplayed his central role in involving G7. Write off debt It was the poorest developing country in 2005 and convened the G20 in 2009 to agree on a bold plan to deal with the global financial crisis. However, these extraordinary successes undoubtedly continue to push him to believe that cooperation and institutional reforms are the way to manage globalization.

As he travels through public health, financial stability, a zero-carbon future, better humanitarian aid, closing tax havens, and preventing nuclear proliferation, I have been thinking about alternatives to “decisively and collectively.” How should governments better manage globalization? There is no doubt that better global governance will make some efforts easier. But given the slow progress, national-level efforts should definitely be doubled. In other words, there may be more room for decisive action alone than some indecisive international cooperation.

This book is an authoritative synthesis of ideas. It is not so much about how to build a fairer and better world, as it is about how global cooperation can contribute to achieving this goal. But behind this positive agenda, since Brown first entered the government in 1997, the predicament of globalization has deepened and intensified. The strong global governance and more generous aid programs he called for at the time looked more dangerous than ever.

Seven ways to change the world: How to solve the most pressing problems we face, By Gordon Brown, Simon & Schuster, RRP £25, 512 pages

Ngaire Woods is the Dean of Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

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