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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

G-20 Summit

The Summit of the Americas: One Eye Wide Open, Another Shut

Submitted by Kaufmann on Fri, 2009-04-17 08:54

President Obama has just written an op-ed for over a dozen newspapers throughout the Americas, in the eve of the Fifth Summit of the Americas that is about to take place in Trinidad & Tobago.

This is significant.  I care deeply about the Latin America and the rest of hemisphere, and wanted to write about the upcoming Summit.  Yet until now what we had was a draft Summit "Declaration" which the country leaders and their (Foreign Ministerial?) teams had been belaboring for a couple of years.

That draft "Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain" is a travesty.  It is interminable and practically devoid of concreteness or substance.  It would be funny if we wouldn't be in the midst of a major economic crisis, one which is expected to hit South America particularly hard in the coming months.  Andres Oppenheimer has commented on that draft, labeling it as a joke.

 

Towards Better Governance by the G-20: Learning from the 'Missing' ggg-8 Countries

Submitted by Kaufmann on Fri, 2009-03-27 08:12

Consider a very different “group-of-8” countries: Botswana, Chile, Mauritius, Uruguay, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland.  Do they have any relevance for the G-20?  Hardly, at first.  None of them are invited to the London G-20 Summit next week.  They are not G-20 members, since neither their economic size nor their population are large enough, and they lack the global “systemic significance” of most G-20 members.  None of them belongs to the EU.  This particular "group-of-8" in fact does not really exist as a formal body.

But there is a neglected rationale for the leaders of the G-20 to pay attention to this particular set of uninvited countries.  Like the G-20, they comprise a rather diverse group of developing and developed countries from different regions of the world.  But, unlike most of the G-20, this group of eight countries have exhibited high quality of national governance.

No country is perfect, obviously.  Each one in this group of 8 industrialized and emerging economies has its own challenges. But overall their quality of governance (and recent trends) exceed those of the Group-of-20, and to an extent even those of the powerful, formal, and elite Group-of-8.

This does matter.  Not just because failures of governance (among key nations in  the G-20) played a major role in today's financial crisis.  It also matters because lessons can be drawn for short and longer term initiatives from the good governance experiences from this group of 8 small countries (in short 'ggg-8' ifor this 'good governance group'-- and not in caps, since they are small, and not a formal group...).

How about next G-20 Summit on good governance for sound financial markets?

Submitted by Kaufmann on Wed, 2008-11-19 18:27

The first G-20 summit, focused on the financial crisis, just took place this past weekend.  When measured against expectations of such gatherings, there were some accomplishments.  Such as in trade:  the collective pledge to avoid raising any trade and investment barriers, or the promise to ‘strive’ for a deal on the stalled Doha round.  And the  summit's ‘action plan’ holds promise. 

The declaration includes a generic list of a plethora of financial sector  ‘principles’ and many areas of work.  But at least it is comprehensive in scope, touching on most of the right ‘buttons’.  It provides space to work concretely on real issues.