What International Organizations Do, and Why They Do It

Year 2015, Volume: 7 Issue: 1, 62 - 77, 11.05.2015

Paul Cammack

Abstract

International organizations work to develop production and exchange (and productivity and
competitiveness) on a global scale, in ways that vary from time to time in accordance with the
state of the world market as a whole and from place to place in accordance with the situation
of individual states. In recent decades the focus on productivity and competitiveness on a
world-wide scale has intensified, prompting a conjunctural focus on responses to the ‘global
financial crisis’, and a deeper strategic focus on ‘structural reforms’. The latter focus on
extending global value chains, promoting industrial policy, pursuing the formalization of
labour, reforming labour markets and social protection, and lowering barriers to trade, in
ways that reflect the ‘completion of the world market’ in terms of exchange. Against this
background the World Bank’s 2015 World Development Report, Mind, Society and Behavior,
exemplifies the principal objective of current global policy - to induce people around the world
to conform in thought and behaviour to the requirements of globally competitive capitalism. It
is seen as the logical culmination and the cutting edge of twenty-five years of increasingly
focused and coordinated work on the part of the international institutions charged with
governing the global economy.

Keywords

International Organizations, the World Market, WDR 2015, Poverty and Development

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