The race to lead the Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), one of the world’s most influential multilateral organisations, has narrowed after the deputy head of the organisation withdrew from the race. The exit of Ulrik Knudsen, who is a former Danish foreign minister, leaves four candidates for the secretary general post, including two women: the former Greek education secretary Anna Diamantopoulou and Cecilia Malmström,.
Although it may not regularly make headlines, the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an important multilateral institution. With its standard-setting capability, the organisation’s 300 committees and 3300-member secretariat have carved unique policy niches on trade, anti-corruption efforts, international taxes, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and official development assistance through the Development Assistance Committee.
With 38 members that represent almost two-thirds of global economic activity, the OECD is the world’s most elite club of free-market economies. This exclusivity has helped the OECD avoid the modern expansion fatigue of other multilateral organisations, such as NATO, whose “open door policy” has hindered its ability to effectively influence its member nations.
The media was again incredibly frustrating at the 4pm covid update yesterday, and in this mornings Herald.
Having Audrey Young doing a grumpy old woman routine asking the same gotcha question a million times ( why are we not told these business now? , and the switcheroo why were this businesses blindsided by releasing their information before informing them? ) was bad enough but her personal annoyance has become the subject of her piece this morning in the paper, where for some vague reason the PM needs to be involved to rev up the MOH over some quibble that Audrey doesn t like.
What is frustrating is ONE WHOLE YEAR after the COVID pandemic began the main media companies are STILL treating the pandemic as primarily a POLITICAL story, using courtier journalists who were excoriated by the public for their addiction to the gotcha dialogue of banter politics and viewing everything through the lens of horse race political analysis. Why was Audrey Young there? Why has the NZ Herald stil
viz., a supra-national entity that has laws, courts and the means to enforce the peace.
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In my view that while the ICC was undeniably a good idea, it never attained the commitment across the board to permit it to succeed.
I ll go back to my original parallel; the reason why nation states are mostly lawful and peaceful places is that ordinary citizens forgo the right to coercion and revenge and place it solely in the hands of the nation state.
In the case of the ICC that never really happened; while most nations signed up to the ICC, there was never the necessary commitment to cede the nation state s own authority and interests. And while I agree the USA is the most outstanding culprit in this respect, it s also understandable given that as by far the most powerful sovereign nation it had the most at stake.
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Interestingly that article starts with a description of appallingly bad safety standards at a major petrochem site in the 1960 s. Yet remarkably everything has changed in the 50 years since; the events he describes are pretty much unthinkable in a developed country today.
In particular:
One day, Sherman was standing in a room, leaning over a large pipe to check a filter, when an operator in a distant control room mistakenly turned a knob, sending hot, almond-smelling, liquid chlorinated hydrocarbons coursing through the pipe, drenching him
I worked for decades in that control room, always aware that I could kill or main with a bad or unlucky decision. Yet the technology advanced dramatically, giving us tools and platforms that properly implemented, making incidents like the above orders of magnitude less likely. Organisations soon realised that investing in safety tech actually saved them cash, and in the past decade virtually every major new in