In his 1972 Janeway Lectures at Princeton, James Tobin, the 1981 Nobel Prize winner for economics, submitted a proposal for a levy on international currency transactions. The idea was not greeted with enthusiasm, as the 1970s were a period of optimism and confidence in floating exchange rages. Yet, whenever currency crises erupted during the past decades, the proposal for a levy on international currency transactions would once again arise. In the 1990s, two additional facts have sharpened interest in the Tobin tax proposal. First is the growing volume of foreign exchange trading. Second,...

This collection offers a new rationale and framework for international development cooperation. Its main argument is that in actual practice, development cooperation has already moved beyond aid (i.e. assistance to poor countries) and onto issues such as the ozone hole, global climate change, HIV, drug trafficking, and financial volatility. These issues are not poverty-related but instead concern global housekeeping, which helps to ensure an adequate provision of global public goods. Contributors include Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Jeffrey Sachs of the Harvard Institute...

Elaborating on the concepts first introduced in Global Public Goods, this book addresses the long overdue issue of how to adjust the concept of public goods to today's economic and political realities. The production of global public goods requires the orchestration of initiatives by a large number of diverse actors across different levels and sectors. It may require the collaboration of governments, business and civil society, and in most cases it almost certainly calls for an effective linkage of the local, national, regional, and global levels. In light of today's new realities, this book...

The world's agenda of international cooperation has changed. The conventional concerns of foreign affairs, international trade, and development assistance, are increasingly sharing the political center stage with a new set of issues. These include trans-border concerns such as global financial stability and market efficiency, risk of global climate change, bio-diversity conservation, control of resurgent and new communicable diseases, food safety, cyber crime and e-commerce, control of drug trafficking, and international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Globalization and increasing...