The assumption that Europe, Japan and the United States could fend off recession at home by increasing exports to BRIC economies has been proved wrong along with the grander notion about the decoupling of emerging markets.
As global trade continues to decrease along with commodity prices, what should be done differently by governments and industry to jump-start global economic growth?
Bio
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is the 14th and current President of the Philippines. A professor of economics, Arroyo entered government in 1987, serving as assistant secretary and undersecretary of the Department of Trade and Industry upon the invitation of President Corazon Aquino.
After serving as a senator from 1992 to 1998, she was elected to the vice presidency under President Joseph Estrada, despite having run on an opposing ticket. After Estrada was accused of corruption, she resigned her cabinet position as Secretary of Social Welfare and Development and joined the growing opposition to the president, who faced impeachment.
Estrada was soon forced from office by what its advocates would ascribe to peaceful street demonstrations of the EDSA Revolution of 2001, but which critics credit to a conspiracy among political and business elites, military top brass and Catholic Church bishop Jaime Cardinal Sin. Arroyo was sworn into the presidency at around noon on January 20, 2001 amidst the EDSA II crowd, hours before Estrada left Malacanang.
She was elected to a full six-year presidential term in the controversial May 2004 Philippine elections, and was sworn in on June 30, 2004.
Angel Gurria
Angel Gurria is Mexico's former Finance Minister (1999-2000) and Minister of Foreign Affairs (1994-1999) in the Ernesto Zedillo Administration.
He also is the Secretary-General for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
Yoshihiko Miyauchi
Yoshihiko Miyauchi is the Chairman and Chief Executive Office of the Orix Corporation in Japan.
In addition to being one of Japan's top corporate leaders, Miyauchi is a strong advocate of regulatory reform and serves as president of the Council for Promoting Regulatory Reform, an advisory board to the prime minister of Japan. In this capacity, he is often referred to as “Mr. Deregulation” and has been described as the free market economy czar of Japan. He serves as a director on the boards of many major corporations including Fuji Xerox, Showa Shell Sekiyu and Sony.
John Monks
John Monks is the General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) in Brussels.He was re-elected as General Secretary in 2007.
Monks has also sat on numerous other bodies, including Acas from 1979 until 1995. In 2000, he agreed to chair the Co-operative Commission, reporting in 2001 with recommendations for the co-operative movement. Since 2008 he is Vice-President of European Movement international.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana in 1943. A graduate of Amherst College, he received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York and Chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. He is also the co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000. In 2008 he was asked by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, which released its final report in September 2009. In 2009 he was appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly as chair of the Commission of Experts on Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System, which also released its report in September 2009.
Stiglitz holds a part-time appointment at the University of Manchester as Chair of the Management Board and Director of Graduate Summer Programs at the Brooks World Poverty Institute. He serves on numerous other boards, including Amherst College's Board of Trustees and Resources for the Future.
Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macro-economics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D.
His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.
Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, he has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He founded one of the leading economics journals, The Journal of Economic Perspectives. His book Globalization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton June 2001) has been translated into 35 languages, besides at least two pirated editions, and in the non-pirated editions has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Other recent books include The Roaring Nineties (W.W. Norton); Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics (Cambridge University Press) with Bruce Greenwald; Fair Trade for All (Oxford University Press), with Andrew Charlton; Making Globalization Work, (W.W. Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane, 2006); and The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, (W.W. Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane, 2008), with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University. His newest book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, was published in January 2010 by WW Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane.
Abhisit Vejjajiva
Abhisit Vejjajiva is the Prime Minister of Thailand.
Abhisit was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England to a family of Thai physicians. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and successfully ran for MP of Bangkok under the Democrat Party following the 1991 NPKC military coup. He quickly rose through party ranks before failing in a bid to become party leader in 2001. He was appointed party leader after the Democrat Party's overwhelming defeat in the 2005 elections.
Abhisit married Dr Pimpen Sakuntabhai, a former dentist and now a lecturer at the Department of Mathematics at Chulalongkorn University. They have two children.
Joseph Stiglitz considers the G-20 a major step forward, though he points to a number of it's flaws.
He believes including more developing nations, like poor countries in Africa, would help balance out the representation and fill a moral authority void.
International body created in 1999 that provides a forum for strategic economic communication between industrialized and developing countries. The G20 originated as a response to the economic crises of the late 1990s. Its membership comprises 19 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and the European Union. Meetings are held annually, and each summit is hosted and chaired by a different member. In addition, emergency summits may be called. Like the G7 (seeG8), the G20 limits its discussion to economic matters.
The economy of United States is the largest national economy in world in both nominal value and by purchasing power parity. Its nominal GDP was estimated as $14.4 trillion in 2008, which is about three times that of the second largest economy, Japan. Though it has the largest economy, it is not the reason for discharge in recession. Surprisingly, an estimated $ 1.6 trillion of U.S securities are owned by China. China is the largest foreign financer of the record S.S public debt, holding $801.5 billion in Treasury bonds. Economic recovery is a nice phrase but when will we have it? No one knows.
It seems to me that the rest of the world outside the United States is side-stepping the United States. That is to say that any talk about the U.S. simply brings eye-rolling or at least that the U.S. money policy regarding the Federal Reserve Bank is touted as the main problem with it constantly printing money that has nothing to back it up, or 'coverage', like the one audience member mentioned in his question to the panel. The fact is that it is true. The Federal Reserve bank in the U.S. simply prints money...driving inflation and ultimately leading to a collapse of value and in turn a collapse in the economy. I think everyone needs to watch Dmitry Orlov's presentation right here on Fora TV. He hits it all right on the head. There will be a time when the world will leave the United States in the dust and move on without it.
Everything that has been questioned about our economic system and current crisis is limited to the same frames that guided us to this situation.
These frames are the ethics valued by our society which are reflected upon the way capitalism has been carried to this day.
Banking policies, government action, green energy, global governance, failures and opportunities, these are the topics being discussed everyday. All of them significant indeed. Nevertheless, subjugated to the individualistic, selfish, shortsighted drive that has pushed this consequences in our way.
We have not questioned openly the ethics of the system yet. We have not had our leaders, our politicians, our economists, our friends, ourselfs, reflect on the ethics of today, of our system.
To see real change we have to address the root of the problem.
