It is essentially non-excludable, there to be enjoyed by all, but from a certain point onward, rival in consumption. It may become polluted and unhealthy if traffic or industrial production increases. In some cases, air quality standards are often introduced to limit the use of air as a dumping ground for pollution. Access to air then also becomes more excludable.
Land is another example of an impure good. But since people often rival each other to reap its benefits, a lush green meadow may turn into degraded, barren land. Or forests may vanish due to a rising demand for wood driven by a booming construction industry. Therefore, private property rights were introduced the world over, progressively reducing the land available for communal, public use.
Sometimes goods may inadvertently be in the public domain because their effects are poorly understood. Think of how long it took us to fully realize the implications of CO2 emissions. Similarly, undesirable side effects of a medicine or building material may only become evident after years. It has also taken us years to become aware of the 'toxic' effects of some financial products and mechanisms, such as risk sharing through derivatives.
These products and technologies remained part of the public domain, were sold in financial markets and were thus available for all who could afford to purchase them. Not only investors have suffered losses as a result, but also innocent bystanders who feel the impact the financial crisis had on the real economy.
In most instances, however, 'public' and 'private' are not innate properties of a good but rather a matter of choice. Land, whether a sea shore or a lake side, can remain public land or be privatized. Similarly, standards for pollution control can be introduced and enforced — or ignored. Technological advances, greater policy sophistication, expanding and diversifying markets, as well as the swing in policy stances towards economic liberalization and privatization, have led many goods to move from the public into the private domain in recent decades.
Even health insurance and pension schemes were impacted by these shifts.
Being Is Enough
Yet while many goods have recently moved from the public to the private domain, others have moved in the opposite direction. National boundaries were established by erecting border posts, emigration and immigration controls, trade barriers and restrictions on the movement of capital. The principles of inviolable national borders and non-interference by outsiders in a state's internal affairs were laid down in the Westphalian peace treaties. They became the founding principles of our world order, ones we still largely abide by today.
For a long time, it was not uncommon for rulers to insist on absolute policy making sovereignty, using national borders as a shield behind which they pursued idiosyncratic policies that sometimes violated the most basic human rights. Yet in recent decades many of the former national borders, no matter how tangible, have been removed or relaxed. Often the driving force has been market integration, facilitated by enhanced transportation and communication technologies. These new opportunities have also enhanced networking opportunities among civil society actors — feminists, environmentalists or activists fighting poverty and corruption.
Global public goods on the rise. Processes like market integration and the globalization of civil society would not have been possible without a corresponding globalization of public goods. Think, for example, of the cross-border harmonization of trade and investment regimes, the promotion of human rights or the standardization of physical infrastructures to facilitate cross-border connectivity. As a result, national public goods NPGs became increasingly globalized — deliberately turned into global public goods GPGs.
Special report: Collective self-interest / Articles - The Broker
Greater border openness was meant to facilitate cross-border economic activity, which it did. Yet the intended international flow of goods and services and increased travel was inevitably accompanied by the flow of unintended and undesirable goods. Just like viruses and diseases, crime and violence could now spread more easily as well. The range and speed of information flows also increased dramatically.
This made it more difficult for autocratic rulers to stem the tide of rising global support for human rights or ignore global expectations about what constitutes a good business climate. Greater border openness thus engendered the further globalization of NPGs. While this universalized human rights, including women's rights, it also facilitated the global spread of policy conditions fostering privatization and economic liberalization. Greater border openness led to an ever denser mesh of national policy domains and deepening policy interdependence among countries.
GPGs are public in the sense that they affect us all, and they are public in provision. It would be difficult for any nation to improve the availability of a GPG like global climate stability through domestic policy initiatives alone. Most GPGs call for cross-border cooperation. Yet, while the importance of mutually beneficial international cooperation has secured some recognition, it has done so mainly at the level of political rhetoric. Actual policy change has encountered several obstacles. When appearing on the international political stage, states behave much like private actors do with public goods.
They look for a free or easy ride. They wait in the wings and let others pay for all or most of the good's costs. Once a good has entered the public domain, they enjoy its benefits — free of charge. At the national level, we have the institution of the state with its special coercive powers, notably taxation powers, to help us overcome such collective action problems.
States compel us to contribute to the provision of public goods, whether we like it or not. Yet the state has no such equivalent at the international level. International, intergovernmental organizations are primarily venues for multilateral debates. Most decisions made at the international level are essentially non-binding. GPGs thus tend to suffer from two types of failure. They suffer from market failure, which means that individuals whether single persons, families or firms are reluctant to voluntarily contribute their own money towards public goods.
And they suffer from state failure, which means that at the international levelstates are motivated by particularism or national interests, which are semi-private interests. States are especially reluctant to enter into any obligation requiring them to make major, long-term financial commitments. Most international agreements therefore typically remain silent on how to meet the financial implications of their recommendations.
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And there are many such cases, because we live in a world of growing disparity and inequity. For example, countries whose populations still have low life expectancy might consider reducing health challenges a higher priority than combating climate change. Thus, the GPGs we encounter during crises typically have significant distributional problems.
They tempt states to shirk responsibility and not to contribute their fair share. By contrast, well-provided GPGs tend to be those with a relatively even spread of net benefits. Examples are the global transport and communication networks. Public goods of this type, whether national, regional or global, are also often referred to as goods in the public interest.
But the lack of effective multilateralism may not only reflect international collective action problems like easy riding. GPGs are not, or at least not merely, foreign affairs, that is, matters beyond national borders. They are global affairs, matters that straddle national borders, that are 'out there' as well as 'in here'. Addressing them might need the involvement not only of foreign affairs ministries but also that of other government entities, including sector or technical ministries such as agriculture, defence, the environment, health, finance or trade.
See a Problem?
GPGs are not merely foreign aid or development assistance issues either, matters exclusively dealt with by aid agencies. Rather, they concern industrial and developing countries, as well as emerging economies. Effectively responding to GPGs therefore often requires cooperation among several sector ministries plus the foreign affairs ministry and the aid agency. Communicable disease control, for example, could call for the involvement of health officials at different levels of government, as well as government entities concerned with international trade, intellectual property rights and foreign aid, not to mention the possible need to forge public-private partnerships.
Though many policy issues today have a global dimension, global affairs departments are not yet a common feature, neither in sector ministries nor in foreign affairs ministries. So it is not surprising that different government entities can be found quibbling about which ministry should lead a government's international negotiating team or take primary responsibility for following up on international commitments. Money is often a major point of contention. Which government entity should pay for the costs involved? Easy riding between national ministries thus adds to states' easy riding internationally.
The growing challenge of providing GPGs occurs at a time when international patterns of decision making are also changing due to the rise of new or re-emerging economic and political powers like Brazil, China, India and South Africa. Conventional powerhouses like the Group of Eight are progressively losing clout.
They find it increasingly difficult to define global norms and rules in line with their interests. Even the less advanced developing countries now claim a more effective say in how to address global challenges, because all too often they have been adversely affected by how GPGs were, or were not, provided. And our cultural imperative suggesting that humans must always be more is not only the social root of humanity's environmental crisis, but also the cause of personal stress. Published November 15th by Hamilton Books first published November 1st To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
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