While sieving through the resources available on globalization, i was reaching out to the core set of institutions meant to promote globalization, the world bank, the IMF, the WTO and few UN agencies - the UNDP, the UNCTAD, the UNESCO, the WHO and the FAO. Some of the recent publications that each of these institutions brought out, had interesting themes and content, which, i felt, will help handhold students to seek basic information and map the global economic environment at a very broad scale, and then depending upon the insights that are gathered, dwell deep into some of the critical aspects through further studies.
What do GPOs push through?
—The focus was temporal… topical and driven by…
promoting an ideology and a concept of new world order… which was on an incremental basis; the issues shifted in tranche of 7-8 year cycles starting from 1990s, 2000s, 2010s …, commencing with economic reforms, privatisation of enterprise and trade; liberalisation of industrial and trade policies, fostering increased international - cross country trade, investment, technology transfer, skills development, migration and currency exchange easing out and sensitising the impact of exploitation of natural resources and driving the climate change mitigation efforts.
— These took support from accelerated trade relations of countries in early 2000s with WTO becoming more influential and leading the corporate push for international business to grow, and support independent trade bodies such as WEF becoming the drivers of globalisation.
—However, the, 2010s took a turn to a more conservative approaches moving with the creation and supporting creation of (a) protective shield by various countries, (in their own ways), to hedge themselves from 2008-09 financial meltdown, with varied results.
In a nutshell, one can broadly say that the GPOs acted in consonance to create and engage with "The
push and pull strategies", in the below directions. Their contributions, outputs and lobbying efrorts can be classified in a simple way, as below:
—Writings on the wall
—Hard core bargaining
—Enablers and supportive clutches
—Analyses and illustrators
—Documentation and advocacy
—Nurturing stakeholders
—Developing connectivity and reciprocity
—Creating and espousing thought leadership by identifying, inverting,
subverting and tilting pyramidal thought processes
In the below paragraphs, these can be gleaned by some intense reading. I am giving a list of the latest documents published by the GPOs. Their reading and analysis, i hope will help me develop a basic but application orientation, a commentary on relevance and appropriateness of each of these documents - from my own limited understanding and the array of perspectives i could generate along with my students, will be posted in forthcoming posts.
The resources that I gathered were from thirteen institutions, grouped into eleven focus areas:
1. From UNDP:
a. The Human Development Report 2013 - highlighting the theme "The Rise of South", hinting the progress made by developing countries in bringing a new canvas of development unfolded in global arena;
b. what will it take to achieve MDG - giving a framework to hasten the implementation of MDG tools
2. From World Bank:
a. The WDR 2014 - focusing on Risk Management as an emerging tool for development in the coming periods
b. The Global developmental horizons - thematic focus on capital for the future - savings and investment in inter-dependent world
3. From IMF:
a. World Economic Outlook 2014 - an assessment of all countries' economic performance and forecasts for 2014
b. Dancing Together - a report on how the 2008 financial crisis brought countries together in acting in unison in overcoming the same
c. Global Financial Stability Report - that deals with the extent of recovery of world from the last decade's recession
4. From World Economic Forum:
a. Global Risks Reporting 2013
b. Global Competitiveness Reporting 2013
c. Enabling Global Trade, thrust of 2013-14
d. Creating Global Value Chains 2013
e. Global IT Development Report 2013, each of which were highly compelling and business driving tools evolved and presented to foster global trade in a topical manner
5. From WTO, UNCTAD And OECD:
a. UNCTAD - World Investment Report, 2013
b. UNCTAD - World Trade and Development Report, 2013
c. OECD - G20 and Developing Global Value Chains, 2013
d. WTO Annual Report 2013
e. WTO - Agreements and Reviews of some major agreements
f. WTO - The toolkits for - designing and implementing tariffs and for eliminating non-tariff barriers, policy making
6. From ADB:
a. Asian Development Outlook, 2012.
While its a mammoth task to read all of these in a day or two, an attempt will be made to capture the salient aspects of teach of these reports in the coming few days and toss them for incisive analysis and class debates, I feel it is also necessary to access the following institutions' publications, so as to close the gaps in the perspectives for the global economic scenarios. They are:
7. From UNESCO - on state of the education across the globe and the challenges and new initiatives emerging;
8. From UNICEF - on issues related to gender and mother and child health;
9. From WHO - on issues related to global status of primary healthcare and advanced healthcare;
10. from FAO - on issues related to agriculture, forestry and sustainability of natural resources as well as poverty associated with rural and agrarian economies
11. from UNFCCC - on issues related to climate change, livelihoods and inter-relation between industry and individual from the point of view of tilted access to resources and mitigation and adoptation issues of exploitative use of natural resources and resultant climate change through people's action vis-a-vis corporate and state action
The purpose of this post is to share the perspectives these immense data bases provide - and also to - nudge the readers to share any other important and essential resources that need to be studied to learn the real picture of global economic environment.
Hope to catchup soon, giving few pointers from each of the above and other resources and throw open the discussions on what do they mean, hint and lead us to work on.
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