Foreword to the report
by Amartya Sen, Honorary President of Oxfam

Global interaction, rather than insulated isolation, has been the basis of economic progress in the world. Trade, along with  migration, communication, and dissemination of scientific and technical knowledge, has helped to break the dominance of  rampant poverty and the pervasiveness of 'nasty, brutish, and short' lives that characterised the world.

And yet, despite all the progress, life is still severely nasty, brutish, and short for a large part of the world population. The great rewards of globalised  trade have come to some, but not to others.

What is needed is to create conditions for a fuller and fairer sharing of the enormous benefits from trade. Can this be done without destroying the global market economy? The answer is very firmly yes. The use of the market economy is consistent with many different resource distributions, rules of operation (such as patent laws and anti-trust regulations), and enabling conditions for participating in the market economy (such as
basic education and health care).

Depending on these  conditions, the market economy itself would generate different prices, dissimilar terms of trades, distinct income distributions, and more generally diverse overall outcomes. Institutional change and policy reform can radically alter the prevailing levels of inequality and poverty, without wrecking the global economy.

This report is concerned precisely with that task. The work involves the diagnosis of institutional features that impede a more equitable sharing of the fruits of trade and exchange. The organisational arrangements that require reform include, for example, the prevailing patent laws that effectively exclude the use of the most needed drugs by the most needy people (while giving little incentive for the development of particularly
appropriate drugs, such as preventive vaccines, which are less attractive to pharmaceutical companies).

I will not try to summarise the report. There is a very useful executive summary - the excellence of which would not, I hope, deter the reading of the entire report. The authors of the report have proposed specific institutional changes which deserve serious attention.

In addition, the broader object of the report is to promote discussion of the kind of institutional architecture that may best serve the interests of the poor and the deprived. The basic objective is to combine the great benefits of trade to which many defenders of globalisation point, with the overarching need for fairness and equity which motivates a major part of the anti-globalisation protests. The constructive agenda of the report draws on both concerns.

Amartya Sen, March 2002

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