A Fair Globalization: Creating Opportunities for All

The Report of the World Commission is a positive but critical message for changing the current path of globalization. It says that the potentials of globalization, in terms of growing connectivity and productive capacity, are immense. However, current systems of governance of globalization at national and international levels have not realized such potentials for most of the world's people-and in many instances have made matters worse. These trends, the Report argues, are largely the result of deep-seated and persistent imbalances in the current workings of the global economy which are both "ethically unacceptable and politically unsustainable." There is an urgent need to rethink current institutions of global economic governance, whose rules and policies it says are largely shaped by powerful countries and powerful players. The vision put forward by the Commission is to bring into being a system of global governance that is genuinely supportive of and conducive to national development strategies ("there can be no successful globalization without a successful localization"), where powerful actors are held accountable, and where efforts to achieve coherence between economic and social objectives would place the needs and aspirations of ordinary people at the centre of rules and policies.