The Diverse Paths Of The Global Drive Towards Sustainability

1. Introduction

The Millennium Development Goals are the world's agreed goals to cut poverty, hunger, and disease. Established in 2000, their targets were to be met by 2015. Importantly, there is already broad agreement on a set of shared goals. Those goals are achievable. The scale of the challenge of implementa­tion on the nowadays troubled world is first-rate. The world is in change of heart. Example: The King of Capitalism, Mr. Gates, comes full-time philan­thropist! The world is driving into a major global slowdown, likely to be the worst in a quarter-century, perhaps since the Great Depression. Many are already turning to the International Monetary Fund for help.

While developed countries engage in stabilizing countercyclical policies, developing countries, as well emerging markets would be forced into destabi­lizing policies, driving away capital when they need it most. The worry is that, at least in some cases, the IMF will go back to its old failed recipes: fiscal and monetary contraction, which would only increase global inequities, showed at G 20 "group therapy" recent event. So, let see if the world may be at a new "Bretton Woods" moment.¹

History teaches us that, even though global financial markets flop into further problems in the 1920s, followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, in the long traction after the end of the Second World War, the market econo­my has been exceptionally dynamic, generating unprecedented expansion of the global economy over the past 60 years. But, it took world almost 15 years and a 'world war' to come together to address the weaknesses in the global political and economical stability that contributed to the Great Depression. It is to be hoped that it will not take us that long this time, because given the level of global interdependence the costs would simply be too high.