The OECD and the World Market

Abstract

Since its founding in 1961 the OECD has consistently sought to extend the world market, encouraging developing countries to compete with advanced economies in industrial markets, and condemning protectionism on both sides. Despite its restricted ‘advanced country’ membership, it looked forward in the last decade of the twentieth century to a ‘new global age’—a time when China and other emerging economies would dominate the global economy. Throughout, it valued competition in the world economy because it pressured all participants to pursue social and structural reforms to enhance their own productivity and competitiveness, and so promoted the development of global capitalism overall. In the present century, it has focused primarily on promoting the reform of welfare in the advanced economies with the objective of ‘making work pay’, and increasing the proportion of working-age populations in paid work. It sees the pursuit of competitiveness as a permanent and essential feature of global capitalism, and counsels states on means of managing the social disruption that welfare and related reforms and recurrent crises will inevitably generate.