Key Meta-Processes Shaping
Development over the Next 10-15 Years
Presentation at the High-level Policy Forum on
‘After 2015: Promoting Pro-poor Policy after MDGs’,
at the Residence Palace, Brussels, 23 June 2009
Charles Gore
Special Coordinator Cross-sectoral Issues,
Division for Africa, Least Developed
Countries and Special Programmes,
UNCTAD .

Causes of the Financial Crisis
• The crisis is not simply a failure of the
financial system (lax financial regulation,
misunderstood financial innovations,
outrageous financial incentives)
• Rather the crisis is rooted in the
contradictions of the current global
development trajectory and weaknesses
of the current development paradigm

Contradictions and Weaknesses
• ‘Market fundamentalism’
• Radical global income inequality
• Global interdependence without global
institutions (missing institutions;
voice/power)
• Socio-insitutional mismatch with emerging
new technological paradigm
• Environmental limits to growth

End of 60-year Development Cycle

Radical Global Income Inequality
• Richest 1 per cent of people receive as much as
poorest 57 per cent (50 million richest receive as
much as 2.7 billion poorest) Milanovic (2005)
Worlds Apart
• Poorest 40 per cent of world population receive
5 per cent of world income (‘failed states’).
• No world middle class. Only 17 per cent of world
population between 75 per cent and 125 per
cent of world median income and they command
only 7 per cent of world income.
• A globalization of expectations without a
globalization of opportunity

GlobaI Interdependence without
Global Institutions
• ‘This is a Bretton Woods moment’ (Jomo)
• Problem of conceptual confusion -
methodological nationalism/notions of global
social justice
• Rise of BRICs, emerging economies and
complex interplay between North-South and
South-South
• UNIDO (2009) expects the major share of global
manufacturing value-added to be produced in
developing countries after the crisis

Transition to a New Technological
Paradigm
• From ‘Fordist mass production’ to an
‘Information and communications
Kondratiev’ (Freeman 1989) or to ‘micro-
electronics and biotechnology’
technological style (Tylecote 1992)
• Emergence of Knowledge Economy and
Knowledge Society
• Problem of delays in energy innovation
and coming peak oil

Environmental Limits to Growth
• Increasing resource pressures associated
with rising population
• Imperative to mitigate and adapt to climate
change. We are now at 387 ppm CO2
‘350 parts per million CO2 is the maximum
amount of carbon in the atmosphere consonant
with the planet in which civilization developed
and to which life on earth is adapted’

Implications for MDG-plus Agenda
The underlying challenge for global
economic governance is to find effective
and fair ways of mitigating and adapting to
climate change whilst at the same time
reducing global income inequalities and
realizing the development aspirations and
unrealized human potential of millions of
people in developing countries.

Implications for MDG Plus Agenda
A New Organizing Principle and Policy Narrative
Kondratieff Spring National Economic
1950s and 1960s Developmentalism Growth
Kondratieff Summer National Economic
1970s Developmentalism Growth
+
Redistribution
Kondratieff Autumn Global Washington
1980s and 1990s Integration Consensus
Kondratieff Winter Global Washington
2007-2012/2015? Integration Consensus
+
Poverty Reduction
and MDGs
Possible Kondratieff Global Develop
Spring? Sustainable Productive
2012/2015-2030? Development Capacities

Implications for MDGs
• Need a new and different international development
consensus (global sustainable development).
• Embed well-being indicators in a different policy
analytical narrative about development (productive
capacities).
• Aid shift: From national development means to achieve
global development goals to global development means
to achieve global development goals.
• MDGs could become social and economic rights which
are guaranteed at a global level and not financed
through national budgets but through innovative global
sources of finance, such as taxes on global transactions.

Thank You
For further information on the productive
capacities approach, see www.unctad.org/ldcr
Especially The Least Developed Countries
Report 2006 and 2007.