Welcome – June 2024
My research supports the links between liberal democracy and good governance at the national level, and between the (mostly) liberal postwar international order and such valuable, if imperfect, public goods as avoidance of major power war and creation of global governance institutions, from the United Nations to the Bretton Woods twins. The contemporary attacks by some major world leaders on international institutions are deeply disturbing.
My investigations into global governance also convince me of the critical links between participation in international governance structures and the distribution of risks and rewards in the international economy. Consequently, I am skeptical of blame-the-victim analyses of international poverty and financial contagion.
The most pressing international challenges of the 21st Century—global warming, maintenance of a mostly-open world trading system, managing security conflicts in Asia and the Middle East, and addressing global inequalities in a sustainable way—cannot be met by interstate consultations limited to participation by the major wealthy industrial democracies, the G7. Only solutions negotiated in more globally-representative fora such as the G20–and with the active cooperation of countries such as Brazil, India, China, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, and Indonesia, Mexico, and many others–will be sufficiently legitimate to hold.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I am committed to the goal of economically informed analysis of the emotive issues of global justice and equity—and equally convinced of the necessity of politically informed debate on ostensibly “technical” subjects such as the structures, institutions, and rules of the international financial architecture.
