Global Cooperation

One of the recurring themes of this semester has been the need (or absence) of international agencies to regulate areas that go beyond the traditional areas where international agencies operate: such as in the realm of world economy (World Bank, IMF) and nuclear proliferation. In chapter 13, Sachs discusses various forms of international cooperation, including private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. For Sachs, solution to many problems in the world lies in technological innovations and the creation of sustainable technologies. Funding for science and technological developments, because the amount of money needed is very high and no immediate profit might be realized, should preferably be taken up by the public sector, with participation of the private and nonprofit sectors. And the problems range from the  traditional economic issues such as poverty, to environmental issues such as desertification.  Sachs emphasizes that unlike in previous UN donations where the US provided the lion's share of financial support, global cooperation should solely be global in that developed and developing countries alike should make their contributions. Projects should start from a limited scale and spread to more places once the pilot projects are successful. Supervision of the projects should have transparency. This can be read as an extension of chapter 12 on foreign policy. One can interpret Sachs as to say that the goal of U.S. foreign policy, as well as the goals of foreign policies of other countries, is to forge such global cooperation to deal with the major problems in the world. With the diverse range of financial donors, global funding, for Sachs, should be diversified and each fund devoted to a specific topic, with close connection to technology that is appropriate for the fund's chief function, e.g. combating malaria or AIDS. In other words, Sachs talks about injecting entrepreneurial energy into non-profit global activities. Global philanthropy or aid goes hand in hand with the true globalization of many other things, including education--with global classrooms made possible by internet and communications technologies. Sachs's advocation for such an entrepreneurial network combining money, technological innovations, education and implementation rests on the premise that the market is not in a position to handle these problems. In real life, we have seen companies take up the responsibility of many areas that do not immediately boost their financial gain, such as self-regulation of pollution emission, because eventually, they realize, environmental problems will negatively impact their operations. One cannot expect all companies to behave that way, nor all companies to treat each global problem the same way, e.g. poverty in a certain part of the world and environmental problems in the US. That is why Sachs goes into such details discussing how to build a workable solution to the many problems of the world through global cooperation relying on non-market mechanisms. It is obvious that Sachs is calling for something beyond the traditional market mechanisms for implementing the millennium goals he has sketched out in these two chapters. He also calls on private companies to start functioning by rules beyond immediate market profitability. Companies should not only provide technologies to poverty stricken regions of the world, but also purchase from these localities, at fair market prices instead of prices forced to artificially low levels, sometimes below cost. In other words, Sachs calls on private companies to see the alleviation of global problems such as poverty and the environment as essential to survival as market profitability. Arguably, a new definition of the market can be understood through the title of the book. Commonwealth can be interpreted either as the earth is our common wealth that every one should invest in nurturing for it to grow, instead of just taking from it, and the world as a commonwealth of states that depend on one another, and the fall of some will ultimately impact the other ones. Besides calling for a new way to define the market, Sachs also calls for new roles of the state, calling for a strengthening of regional democratic institutions and their power to promote global cooperation and the promotion of commonwealth. These views are interesting and some may think too radical. It will be interesting to see your reactions.