Global Public Goods

The next aspect of the conference I want to understand more about is Global Public Goods.

What are Global Public Goods?

The term Global Public Good is hard to define. The best definition is rather vague, but still gives a reasonable idea. A Global Public Good is a "good" that is available on more-or-less worldwide basis. Global Public Goods traditionally have the three following properties:

- Non-Rivalrous: Consumption of this good by anyone does not reduce the quantity available to other agents.
- Non-Excludable: It is impossible to prevent anyone from consuming that good.
- It is available more-or-less worldwide.

According to Kaul, Grundberg and Stern, Global Public Goods have usually consisted of 'Traffic Rules' between countries and border issues such as tariffs. Today, targets such as disease control, pollution reduction, crisis prevention, and harmonized norms and standards are what is considered "important". The reason being enhanced openness, growing systemic risks, and the policy demands of the growing number of transnational actors in both business and civil society. A major reason for the under-provision of this new class of global public goods — we call them global policy outcomes — is that public policy-making has not yet adjusted to present-day realities. There are three major gaps:

- Juristictional Gap: The discrepancy between the global boundaries of today’s major policy concerns and the essentially national boundaries of policy-making.
- Participation Gap: Which results from the fact that we live in a multiactor world but international cooperation is still primarily intergovernmental.
- Incentive Gap: Because moral suasion is not enough for countries to correct their international spillovers or to cooperate for the global public good.

Cooperation is everything when it comes to the continuation of Global Public Goods. And not just cooperation that mistakenly assumes that the sphere of “public” ends at national borders, but cooperation that recognizes that an efficient system of global public policy is a necessary ingredient of an efficient global economy.