WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala delivered the Per Jacobsson Lecture at the IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings in October, calling for better communication about the benefits of international commerce.
“Trade is sometimes blamed and scapegoated for poor outcomes that really derive from macroeconomic, technological, or social policy for which trade is not responsible,” she said, warning that walking away from the trading system would diminish the world’s ability to respond to problems affecting people’s lives and opportunities. The memory of the collapse of the international order that Jacobsson observed a century ago echoes today, Okonjo-Iweala said, but the genius of the Bretton Woods institutions that followed is that it turned those vicious cycles into virtuous ones.
Jacobsson was a Swedish economist at the League of Nations and Bank for International Settlements in the 1920s and 1930s who led the IMF in 1956–63.
Today, the world needs new trade rules that fit the times, and countries can have interdependence without overdependence, said Okonjo-Iweala, an economist and international development expert who in 2021 became the first woman and the first African to lead the Geneva-based organization whose terms govern 75 percent of global trade.
“Over the past eight decades, the multilateral economic architecture, including the trading system, has delivered a great deal for the world,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “We have reinvented it before. We can do so again for people and planet.”
Source:IMF
https://links-1.govdelivery.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fmeetings.imf.org%2Fen%2F2024%2FAnnual%2FSchedule%2F2024%2F10%2F26%2Fimf-per-jacobsson-lecture%3Futm_medium=email%26utm_source=govdelivery/1/010001930c52f682-aff83e5d-3ddf-42bc-9a9c-a800dca3b09e-000000/H_rbQ_oN45l-W8odktadCgR6u1yDtGUov7lI3Wqf_QU=378
