Global Development: Views from the Center

The wake-up call came as a bit of a shock. Ernesto Zedillo, the highly regarded former president of Mexico and director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, was discussing the record of international institutions and the powerful countries that run them. On their response to unprecedented international cooperation and coordination challenges, he was in no mood to mince words.

We tend to think of globalization in the following way: the rich world exports financial capital, technology, sophisticated goods, and entrepreneurial and managerial skills in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) to developing countries; the latter, in turn, export people, resources, and low-skilled goods to the rich world.

In its special report on the rise and fall of the wealthy, referring to the trends in income inequality in the United States The Economist (April 4-10th 2009, p. 3) states “… Another international study found that only Mexico and Russia had more unequal income distributions than America.” That is plain wrong.

The outcome of today’s G20 summit has become even more critical for developing countries as the World Bank revised the 2009 forecast for GDP growth in the developing world to 2.1 percent down from 5.8 percent in 2008. But a draft copy of the G20 communiqué published by the Financial Times could go farther in its commitment to help the world’s most vulnerable countries.