According to the South Centre, the global economic system is at a turning point, and the need to rethink the Financing for Development (FfD) concepts proposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) is becoming increasingly apparent. It is unlikely that leaders from the North and South will rise to this challenge when they meet for the UN conference on development finance in Doha later this month. The FfD conference in Doha will most likely come up with language to address the concerns of the South without embarrassing the North. The final document will probably be in favour of globalisation, minimising its downsides.

Statement by Board Members of the South Centre

The financial crisis has shown how dysfunctional the current international financial architecture is to manage the global economy of today, with its myriad of interconnections through which financial turmoil spreads across the world and with its revealed and significant regulatory deficit. In the 1980s, the debt crisis in Latin America, Africa and other parts of the developing world, and in the late 1990s the succession of the Asian, Russian and Latin American crises, had already revealed that something was deeply wrong with that architecture. The industrial world did not understand the need for serious rethinking of the governance of global finance.The fact that this time developed countries are at the center of the storm may now lead them into action.