Rebalancing Global Economic Governance - REPORT

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Executive summary In October 2014, a number of Chinese and International Experts gathered together in Beijing to discuss global economic governance and financing for development issues within the Post-2015 Agenda framework. This report has been drafted in light of those discussions and is based on some of the main proposals raised by participants. The report is divided into two main sections; each section contains two chapters. Concluding recommendations are provided at the end of every chapter. The first section sets the scene by analysing what challenges global economic governance needs to address. Since the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted in 2000, there has been considerable success in terms of poverty reduction. However widening income, education and health inequalities, and environmental degradation have become some of the world’s greatest challenges. The report notes the strong call for sustainable global development that has emerged, requiring the international community to step up to provide answers and solutions to global challenges. 2015 is the year that the MDGs were planned to be achieved and the year that a new set of global goals will be introduced. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) now under discussion try to pave the way towards a sustainable development path that tries to address development in its three dimensions: social, economic and environmental. This opening chapter thus calls for the international community as a whole to rethink the global economic governance architecture and to reconfigure macroeconomic policies currently in place towards stability and development. Further, based on China’s experience, the chapter suggests that each country may want to quickly integrate and prioritize some of the SDGs into their national plans. In parallel, in order to build inclusive and sustainable economies, data to evaluate performance against SDGs will need to become broader, deeper and more precise. The second chapter focuses on how to confront the challenges of global economic governance vis-à -vis the development and global public goods encompassed in the Post-2015 Agenda. For instance, there are discussions on how to generate the finance and deliver the supportive structural policies (such as trade, etc) both at domestic and international level to deliver the post-2015 agenda. Global economic governance is progressing, but in a fragmented way. Its institutions are struggling to restructure at the speed required to keep up with global economic power shifts - characterized by emerging economies like China that are increasingly playing a more pivotal role. As a result, bilateral and regional initiatives are proliferating in order to fill gaps and make progress in areas that seem to be stalling multilaterally. These is also a rising awareness that many issues might be more efficiently tackled at the local and regional levels rather than just national. Our analysis suggests that if these trends do not reverse, more

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