Session Summary: Multilateralism 2.0 – A New Social Contract and a Global Green New Deal

Trade is a means not an end – it needs to achieve key social and environmental objectives if it is to have legitimacy. Overcoming the current legitimacy crisis is not simply a public relations exercise (i.e. more than better explanations of the benefits of trade needed). Rather, it requires tackling the real problems and failings of current global trade rules.

Economies are in an increasingly unstable environment facing a slowing growth, a ballooning debt, currency fluctuations caused by capital outflows, galloping inequality rates, and various other global governance failures underpinned by a developing climate crisis. Many of these shortcomings could have been addressed in the opportunity the 2009 crisis offered. However, world leaders did not make sufficient changes in the rules of hyperglobalisation.

In order to achieve the 2030 goals and address the climate crisis, a massive investment push is needed in a series of interconnected public goods. The UNCTAD estimates that the world economy needs $2-3 trillion per year and a new rule-book that regulates the activities of the perpetrators of the last financial collapse and takes power away from them and brings it back under publicly controlled policy-making. The UNCTAD has detailed plans for a Global Green New Deal in its Trade and Development Report 2019.

Read the full session report of the ITUC-organised event at the WTO Public Forum 2019:

Session Summary: Multilateralism 2.0 – A New Social Contract and a Global Green New Deal
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