If industrialized countries did more to open their markets, developing countries could increase their exports by many billions of dollars per year -far more than they receive in aid. For many millions of poor people this could make the difference between their present misery and a decent life.

After the devastation of the Second World War, far-sighted statesmen deliberately constructed a post war economic and political order governed by the rules that would make free trade possible and thereby, they believed, make future wars less likely. Several factors combined, at the time, to make such a liberal world order possible. One of them was board consensus on the role of the state in ensuring full employment, price stability and social safety nets. Another was that most big firms were within a single country-so that international economic relations could be negotiated between states, each of which corresponded to a distinct national economy, and could be controlled by raising or lowering barriers at national frontiers. That in turn made it relatively easy to put in place a set of international organization that were based on, and in their turn supported, the economic order, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, GATT, and the United Nations.

Today's world is very different, today networks of production and finance have broken free from national borders and become truly global. But they have left the rest of the system far behind. National states, and the institutions in which they are represented, can set the rules within which international exchanges take place, but they can no longer dictate the terms of such exchanges exclusively among themselves. The new global economy is not embedded, as the old national economies were, in a broad framework of shared values and institutionalized practices. The result is that, on top of the gross imbalance of power and wealth between industrialized countries and developing ones, there is now a second imbalance the gap between the integration of the world economy and the continued parochialism of political and social institutions. Whereas economics is global, politics remains obstinately local. It is for this reason that so many people, even in the industrialized world, feel vulnerable and helpless. That is why humankind has arrived at such a historic juncture.