Who must pay for the damage of the global financial crisis?

In 2009 the President of the UN General Assembly organised an ambitious conference to deal with the effects of the global financial crisis on developing countries. The draft document for the conference called for a coordinated $3 trillion ‘Global Stimulus for Restructuring and Survival’, intended to ‘help address the strains posed by economic downturn on the poor’ and ‘lay the basis for a new economy based on human needs, human rights and human security’.¹ This bold idea did not survive the final vote. The world’s collective governments shied away from the notion of a global stimulus in the adopted resolution, which meekly concluded that ‘each country has primary responsibility for its own economic and social development’.² The commandingly titled ‘Global Plan for Recovery and Relief’ adopted by the G-20 in April 2009 was similarly noncommittal about the allocation of responsibility for the costs borne by developing countries. The G-20 is willing to help, of course, but only because ‘emerging markets and developing countries… are also now facing challenges which are adding to the current downturn in the global economy’.³.