Augusto Lopez-Claros

A Second Charter: Imagining a Renewed United Nations

The contemporary crises faced by humanity require a new kind of international agreement. One which will prevent accelerating climate change from ruining the world for future generations, deescalate the high levels of nationalism which risk precipitating further global conflicts, and address economic and social inequities which could undermine the basis of democracy and good governance. One which will remove the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons and place global security on international agreements securing freedom and democracy for all nations rather than on the military preparedness of individual states.

This is a world which the UN, as currently constituted, with its decision-making capacities paralyzed by the veto powers of its permanent Security Council members, cannot achieve. At the 1945 conference in San Francisco where the UN Charter was adopted the UN´s founding members, conscious of the need to placate many countries which viewed the veto as undermining the legitimacy and future effectiveness of the UN, introduced Article 109—allowing for a future review of the appropriateness of the Charter in light of changes in the world. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s 2024 Summit of the Future provides the perfect opportunity to enact Article 109, binding states to hold a General Conference prior to 2030 where the Charter can be reviewed, and the first steps can be taken to confront the global catastrophic risks which threaten our future.

Reforming the Global Financial Architecture: Priorities and Risks

This talk will discuss the principal challenges underpinning the current state of our global financial architecture against the background of important structural shifts which have taken place in recent decades in the global economy. In particular, the emergence of China as the world’s largest economy, and the fact that international trade is no longer the engine of global economic growth it has been during the past several decades. A further important factor in coming years will be fiscal pressures coming from population ageing, the effects of climate change and the constraints imposed on public expenditures by the quick rise in the share of budgets allocated to debt servicing. Dealing with the next global financial crisis in the context of sharply reduced fiscal space will clearly be a crucial third shift.

The talk will pay particular attention to the IMF’s surveillance function and its asymmetric character and the extent to which it undermines not only the effectiveness but also the credibility of the organization and examine the IMF’s lending capacity and whether it is adequate for future crisis management. The talk will also tackle the thorny issue of IMF members’ voting powers and the possible role the SDR could play in giving the IMF a stronger role in financing the transition to a renewable energy economy.

The Many Problems of Rising Income Inequality

Widening income disparities are leading many economists and policymakers to question some foundational elements of our current economic system. Indeed, income inequality has ceased to be purely a problem of resource allocation, to be delegated to academia, and has rapidly emerged as a serious economic problem with the capacity to undermine the stability of our social and political order. We will review some of the problems created by widening income disparities, both for policymakers and, more generally, for social cohesion and sustainable economic development.

The presentation will also explore several ways in which inequality could be mitigated over the medium term, all of them within the grasp of governments everywhere, particularly in the developing world, where inequality has especially undesirable consequences. None of these possible remedies to the problem of inequality are getting the attention they deserve, all of them would make a great difference.

Equality for Women = Prosperity for All

Gender discrimination is often seen from a human rights perspective; it is a violation of women’s basic human rights, as embedded in the Universal Declaration, the UN Charter and other such founding documents. Moreover, there is overwhelming evidence that restrictions and various forms of discrimination against women are also bad economics. They undermine the talent pool available to the private sector, they distort power relationships within the family and lead to inefficiencies in the use of resources. They contribute to create an environment in which women, de facto, are second class citizens, with fewer options than men, lower quality jobs, lower pay, often the victims of various forms of violence, literally from the cradle to the grave. They are also not fully politically empowered and have scant presence in the corridors of power, whether as finance ministers, central bank governors, prime ministers or on the boards of leading corporations.

Why is gender inequality so pervasive? Where does it come from? Does it have cultural and religious roots? And what are the sorts of policies and values that will deliver a world in which being born a boy or a girl is no longer a measure of the likelihood of developing one’s human potential? A look at some of these and other such difficult questions.

Financing Instruments for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

There is broad recognition that the national emission targets put forth by the Parties at COP 21 in Paris in 2015 are not consistent with limiting a temperature rise to 2◦C above preindustrial levels. Absent mitigation of GHG emissions global temperatures will be on a rapidly ascending trajectory and rise some 3-4◦C by the end of this century.

Given the associated damage to the global economy and its supporting ecosystems and to the natural world more generally there has been increasing emphasis in recent years in identifying policies that might facilitate climate change mitigation and adaptation. One particular area of focus has been on the financing needs associated with significant investments in various forms of infrastructure, including investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy. Such investments—in the tens of trillions of dollars over the next decade—would have to prioritize building low-carbon resilient infrastructures, with nearly two thirds of these outlays taking place in emerging markets and developing countries.

The aim is to find fiscal tools and regulatory policies that might make it costlier to emit GHGs and thus provide the types of incentives for businesses and individuals to choose to conserve energy and/or to switch to more environmentally friendly (greener) sources. This question has moved centerstage against the background of COVID-19, the responses to which have greatly stretched budget resources virtually everywhere. Some of the instruments discussed in this lecture are fundamentally aimed at altering incentives as a way of encouraging a shift to a low-carbon economy (e.g., carbon taxes, green financial instruments), while others are mainly intended to raise revenue (e.g., taxing financial transactions, debt relief, improving/modernizing tax systems), which then governments could use, at least in part, to finance climate change mitigation.

Financial resources will also be needed for adaptation and to boost resilience, in such areas as food security and agricultural productivity, emerging water scarcity, and disaster risk management. Without the types of interventions that improve adaptation and resilience climate change will severely put out of reach the attainment of many of the SDGs, including on the elimination of extreme poverty. It could also make the world more vulnerable to the kind of pandemic that devastated the global economy in 2020.