MIT Connection Science, in collaboration with the World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid (WLA-CdM) and the Boston Global Forum, is working to bring about a new paradigm in global trade, finance, and governance systems. With tools to securely collect, share, and analyze data, governments and communities can build better systems for health, monetary exchange, economic development, trade, and more. Global leaders are beginning to call for a rethinking of old governance systems, which are no longer meeting the challenges of the times.
In 1944, world leaders from 44 nations convened at the Mount Washington hotel in Bretton Woods, NH in an attempt to heal and revitalize the world economy following WWII. The solutions they developed were not perfect, but they laid the foundations for the global financial systems and multilateral organizations that still exist and shape the world today, including the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (precursor to the World Bank). The Bretton Woods accord helped bring stability to a turbulent world ravaged by conflict. However, the relative stability of global economic policy is today giving way to renewed turmoil.
“Unfortunately,” says MIT Connection Science Director, Prof. Sandy Pentland, Member of the AIWS City’s Board of Leaders, “the systems and institutions established at Bretton Woods are proving too slow and too siloed to address the world’s current problems. Not since WWII have public debt and the national economies of so many nations been in such disarray.”
Governance of digital platforms has become unexpectedly urgent.
The article can be read here.