Sunday Ojeme 
A former Prime Minister of United Kingdom, Mr. Gordon Brown, has advised the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to properly deploy the experience of the current Director General of the organisation, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to solve global trade disputes.
Brown, while advocating stronger multilateralism in global trade interactions at the April 2024 PIIE-IMF conference on steering structural change, said the WTO should put to best use the undoubted skills of Okonjo-Iweala “to solve trade disputes by conciliation, arbitration, and negotiation, marking a move away from its overly legalistic and now broken judge-based appeal system.”
He said, simultaneously, the IMF should enhance its role in crisis prevention and crisis resolution, adding that under the strong leadership of Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF should give more priority to its pivotal role as an early-warning system for the world economy, mobilise its $1 trillion lending capacity to offer better insurance against economic shocks, negotiate a much-improved sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, and thus create a more comprehensive global financial safety net.
According to him, “with 59.1 per cent of voting shares in the IMF held by countries representing 13.7 per cent of the world’s population, while India’s and China’s combined share is only nine per cent, the IMF must reform its constitution.
“The World Bank must become, as its dynamic new president, Ajay Banga, has proposed, a global public goods bank focused on both human capital and environmental stewardship.
“It is estimated that emerging market and developing economies, excluding China, need $3 trillion a year by 2030 to fund climate action and the SDGs, of which $2 trillion should be raised domestically and $1 trillion will have to come from outside.
Brown, in his paper titled: “We Must Place Our Hope in Multilateralism,” said the Summers-Singh Group of Twenty (G20) report had proposed that multilateral development banks provide an annual increase of $260 billion.
“Innovative financial mechanisms, including the use of guarantees to de-risk and scale up private sector investment, must be mobilised to boost and complement these efforts. The World Bank and multilateral development banks will need further funds from shareholders through a capital increase.
“Given that the membership of the Group of Seven is too narrow to be the steering committee for the world economy, the G20 should become what it was intended to be: the premier forum for global economic cooperation.
For that to work, it needs to be more representative through a constituency system, and it should assemble a professional secretariat that can ensure continuity of policy from year to year.
“Maintaining hope in challenging times is essential. Kennedy’s nuclear test ban treaty in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan’s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s nuclear arms reductions in the 1980s, multinational efforts to prevent the depletion of the ozone layer in the 1990s, the 2009 G20 summit stabilizing the global economy, and the more recent Paris accord on climate all demonstrate the potential for global cooperation. But success requires visionary leadership and a willingness to work together.”
