A major policy report has been produced with proposals for the Financing for Development summit to be held next March 2002 in Monterrey, Mexico. The report, written by a High Level Panel appointed by the UN Secretary General, urges that aid should be targeted to poverty reduction and provided on a common pool basis without conditionality. “Borrowing countries should be given the opportunity to choose their own path to reform,” it states.
Aid flows should be increased and “consideration should be given to establishing a separate income source, perhaps in the form of a carbon tax, to finance the supply of global public goods”. The report is less keen on a Tobin Tax on international currency transactions, but proposes the establishment of a new International Tax Organisation to consider various taxation proposals.
The Panel is critical of current global economic governance arrangements, which have not kept pace with the growth of international interdependence. It supports the creation of a high-level council on Global Governance to provide leadership on these issues. The report also supports the establishment of “a Global Environment Organization with standing equivalent to that of WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank”.
A wide range of Mexican NGO networks have started to prepare an alternative meeting to be held just before the official one next March. Their theme will be “power and economic decision-making”
UN Financing for Development website
South Centre: intergovernmental organisation of developing countries
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