Jan

10

2005

4:00—6:00 PM

Brookings Institution

,

BOOK TALK

Financing Development: The Power of Regionalism

On January 10, 2005 the Center for Global Development launched a new book titled: Financing Development: The Power of Regionalism edited by Nancy Birdsall and Liliana Rojas-Suarez.

The historic 2002 United Nations Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, overlooked a crucial question: regionalism. "Financing Development: The Power of Regionalism" is designed to correct this omission. The Editors argue that far from undermining multilateral arrangements, as some critics fear, regional agreements can promote greater integration into the global system. Benefits include lower trade barriers, shared infrastructure investments and enhanced cooperation in the development of financial markets. The papers in the book are drawn from a roundtable discussion organized by the Center for Global Development and the Institute for International Economics.

The book contains contributions by: Eduardo Aninat, C. Fred Bergsten, Willem Buiter, Guillermo Calvo, Robert Devlin, Omar Kabbaj, Enrique Iglesias, Allan Meltzer, and Roberto Zahler.

Download a full text transcript of the event presentations.

The book release featured remarks by:

José Antonio Ocampo Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs United Nations		“One of the very interesting contributions of this book is that it tries to make the point that the agenda for regional institutions is much broader than we have usually thought of.” "I think there's a role for many in the game and I really congratulate the authors for making this point very strongly. Thank you very much.”
The Honorable Knut Vollebaek Norwegian Ambassador to the United States		“The book launched today underlines that the global and individual country perspective somehow neglects the regional level. This constitutes a very unfortunate gap in our perspectives and approaches. I am, therefore, very happy to see that this book has been written, making the convincing case that regionalism done right does not undermine multilateral agreements. To the contrary, regional initiatives and processes have the potential to stimulate global action and poverty reduction.”
Paulo Fernando Gomes Executive Director, Africa Group Two World Bank		“[Y]ou did an excellent job in building a strong framework for understanding the challenge of regional integration, the use of regional arrangements, the trade issues, the public goods, and I think it's a very good platform for someone to understand the issues and the challenges on the regionalism.”