22.  What is in the book for industrial countries?

Like developing countries, industrial countries also face numerous challenges due to globalization. Increased demand for a clean environment, food safety or improved international peace and security are only some of the global public goods that are supported by a very sizable constituency in these countries. Increasingly, these countries—even the most powerful or richest ones among them—find it difficult if not impossible to produce public goods unilaterally. They too have reason to view the proposals for enhancing international cooperation in Providing Global Public Goods with interest.

In addition, "aid fatigue" in the industrialized world has contributed to an increased push for a more effective foreign aid program. Part of the challenge here is to appropriately distinguish an emerging dual agenda in international development policy today: aid and global public goods. Providing Global Public Goods explains how the former deals with the equity issue, while the latter answers mainly to an efficiency issue. Thus, these are complementary objectives and one should not be sacrificed in favor of the other. Obfuscating these tools—that is, financing global public goods provision with foreign aid—runs the risk of failing both objectives. Lower foreign aid deprives developing countries of much needed resources to pursue their development plans, while aid financed global public goods skews incentives for cooperation. (See also the answer to question 18.) Developing a dual agenda for international development policy—aid plus global public goods—is therefore in the interest of the industrialized world.