Cross-Border Externalities, International Public Goods and Their Implications for Aid Agencies

The interplay between cross-border externalities, international public goods and development assistance, and the relationship between this interplay and the conventional rationales for development assistance, will be a key problematic facing aid agencies in the next decade. This note sets out a conceptual framework for thinking through the problematic, and draws some tentative implications for these major actors in global governance. * Comments for Conference on Global Tensions in honor of Ester Boserup, Cornell University, March 910, 2001. The arguments made here are based on and developments of ideas presented in R. Kanbur, T. Sandler and K. Morrison, The Future of Development Assistance: Common Pools and International Public Goods, Overseas development Council and Johns Hopkins, 1999; R. Jayaraman and R. Kanbur, “International Public Goods and the Case for Foreign Aid,” in I.Kaul, I. Grunberg and M.A. Stern (eds.), Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21 Century, Oxford University Press, 1999; R. Kanbur, "The Intersection of Development Assistance and International Public Goods", July 2000, http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/sk145/papers/Kanbur_Intersection.pdf; and R. Kanbur, "Aid, Conditionality and Debt in Africa", in Finn Tarp (ed), Foreign Aid and Development: Lessons Learnt and Directions for the Future, Routledge, 2000.