Providing global public goods—managing globalisation, edited by Inge Kaul, Pedro ConceiçãO, Katell Le Goulven and Ronald Mendoza (eds) (New York: oxford university press, 2003, pp. 646 + xxii, h/bk, p/bk)

✍ Scribed by Lars Christian Moller

• Book ID: 102351607
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 39 KB
• Volume: 17
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.1101

✦ Synopsis

With its 1999 publication Global Public Goods-International Cooperation in the 21st Century, UNDP was instrumental in introducing an important topic to a wide international audience at a time when many were saying that globalization had gone too far. A key insight then was that many international challenges such as reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS, controlling climate change, containing financial crises and combating drug trafficking all had something in common. They are global public goods (GPGs), i.e. goods that are underprovided by the market because they have the characteristics of being nonrival and nonexcludable. Drawing upon a substantial economic literature peppered with ideas from politics and international relations, UNDP framed these challenges as a collective action problem. The 1999 volume had numerous contributions by well-known scholars, making it a very convincing, relevant and readable volume.

Expectations were therefore high when a sequel was published earlier last year, although the legitimate question of 'what value added it could bring' was always looming in the back of the mind. An important objective must have been to sustain the topic on the international policy agenda. A number of bilateral donors (e.g. Sweden, France and Canada) are now taking GPGs seriously, partly as a response to UNDP's lead. However, as with many other 'buzz words' in 'development' the risk of remaining just that always looms. Although the PR objective has been fulfilled by means of this publication, Kaul et al. might have done their cause a disfavour by publishing a 645 page volume that does not live up to the standards of its predecessor.

The introductory section of the book motivates the topic and contextualises GPGs in the debate about globalisation. It proceeds by posing a number of pertinent questions such as: Who decides whether to make a good public or private? How can the provision of public goods be improved? In answering the last question the authors point to four main actions: refurbishing the analytical toolkit, matching stakeholders and decision makers, systematising financing of GPGs and fostering institutional interaction. The book is organized around these four themes and concludes with a handful of interesting case studies on biodiversity, corruption, water and intellectual property laws.

Part 1 revisits some of the concepts and theories associated with public goods. Desai takes a historical perspective and observes that although public goods have been provided since the Middle Ages, the theoretical foundation is of fairly recent origin and needs to be updated in light of current political realities. In response to this, Kaul and Mendoza introduce the triangle of publicness focusing on publicness in three different dimensions: consumption, net benefits and decision making. The renewed emphasis on decision making illustrates how UNDP is expanding the existing definitions and although this might make many economists uncomfortable, it does suit the book's ambition of making the analysis more inter-disciplinary. Part 1 also contains a novel measure for optimal provision proposed by Sandler: an index of optimality that assesses the extent to which public goods are provided by clubs (which tend to be optimally provided).

In another contribution of part 1, Sandmo argues that global public goods are best provided when combined with a policy of international transfers (using a model developed some thirty years earlier by Sandler). For instance, rich countries can obtain more worldwide biodiversity by paying poor countries to spend more money on protecting endangered species. Importantly, these payments should take place not because the recipients are poor, but to ensure a Pareto efficient outcome. Aid, on the other hand, should deal with the objective of international distribution, i.e. economic development and poverty reduction. Despite the importance of these insights, they are not novel. Thus, while the editors point to some limitations of existing theory, the book itself only makes few contributions to redress them.