SM | DEVELOPMENT
without genuine consensus that they are moving in the right direction . The backlash against globalization is fed by a climate of suspicion : experts , economists , international institutions are not trusted . During the 2000s , the G20 and the IMF moved to public assessments of how policy spillovers affected the world — and in particular examined the multilateral dimensions of trade imbalances and their various causes , including monetary policy stances and structural and demographic developments .
This public style of action looks more appropriate in an age of transparency — when information technology seems less secure , when secrets leak , when WikiLeaks flourish . Today it is unwise to assume that anything is secret .
The accessibility of information presents a fundamental dilemma . Policy advice is invariably quite complicated . Spillovers and feedback require a great deal of analysis and explanation and cannot easily be reduced to simple formulas .
Accessible information Should international institutions be more like judges , or priests and psychoanalysts , or persuaders ? The traditional roles by themselves are no longer credible . But multilateral institutions will also find it impossible to take on all three roles simultaneously . Judges do not usually need to embark on long explanations as to why their rulings are correct . If they act as persuaders , maintaining a hyperactive Twitter account , they merely look self-interested and lose credibility . But if they are secretive — like the World Bank ’ s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes — they may be more efficient ( as measured by the gains from their rulings ) but will lose legitimacy .
It is easy to see why the institutions that built the stability of the post-1945 order might be despondent in the face of apparently insuperable challenges . It is hard to apply fundamental and widely shared principles such as human dignity and sustainability to the minutiae of policy . But the institutions might harness the new technologies to successfully mediate disputes that threaten to divide but also to impoverish the world .
In the postcrisis world , ever larger and more updated amounts of data are available . In the past , we had to wait months or years for accurate assessments of the volume of economic activity or trade . Data on a much broader set of measurable outcomes , including measures of health and economic activity , are now available in real time . Managing and publishing those data in accessible and intelligible ways can be critical to forming the debate about the future and about the way individuals , societies , and nations interact . Instead of a judge , multilateral institutions can become purveyors of the costs and benefits of alternative policies . They need to work on ways of letting data speak .
Some of the issues to be addressed are new , or appear in new forms , and are global public goods : defense against diseases that spread easily in an age of mass travel , against terrorism , against environmental destruction . In each case , the availability of large amounts of detailed information , available quickly , is essential to coordinate an effective response : for instance , where there is pollution and how it affects health and sustainability and where and why it originates . Even large countries cannot find the right response on their own .
Some of today ’ s problems were already identified at Bretton Woods : How can countries avoid unsustainable current account deficits , which make them vulnerable to shocks and reversals of confidence on the part of capital markets ? How can large surpluses that impose a deflation risk on the rest of the world be reduced ? Regional agreements cannot find an answer to these problems . Simple global answers are also impractical and unlikely to sustain consensus . Instead , large amounts of data hold the key to effective action , identification of precisely how the financing of external imbalances is achieved , and the circumstances that make a major external imbalance harmful and destabilizing . Much more than in 1944 and 1945 , governance will depend on information .
38 | NOV . 2017