People need both private and public goods for their well‐being. This chapter focuses on public goods, introducing the generic concept of public goods first, refining this generic definition, and identifying the distinguishing characteristics of global public goods. The main properties and distinguishing features of international public goods, including regional and global public goods can be grouped into two sets. The first is that their benefits have strong qualities of publicness – i.e., they are marked by nonrivalry in consumption and nonexcludability. These features place them in the general category of public goods. The second criterion is that their benefits are quasi universal in terms of countries (covering more than one group of countries), people (accruing to several, preferably all population groups), and generations (extending to both current and future generations, or at least meeting the needs of current generations without foreclosing development options for future generations). This property makes humanity as a whole the publicum, or beneficiary of global public goods.

This collection of papers offers a new rationale and framework for international development cooperation. Its main argument is that in actual practice development cooperation has already moved beyond aid. In the name of aid (i.e., assistance to poor countries), we are today dealing with issues such as the ozone hole, global climate change, HIV, drug trafficking, and financial volatility. All of these issues are not really poverty related. Rather, they concern global housekeeping: ensuring an adequate provision of global public goods. Many important lessons could be drawn by first recognizing this fact – revealing innovative reforms toward more effective international policy making in the twenty‐first century.

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The theory of hegemonic stability has become a widely accepted explanation for the dynamics of the world economy. By linking the economy's structure and evolution with the international distribution of power, the theory combines political factors and economic outcomes and therefore satisfies the need for a truly political international economics, a need felt since the 1970s and reaffirmed with the recent emphasis on national power variables often referred to as neorealism. The theory basically holds that cooperation and a well-functioning world economy are dependent on a certain kind of political structure, a structure characterized by the dominance of a single actor. Dominance by a hegemonic power constitutes the optimal situation for ensuring and maintaining an open and stable world economy. Both Great Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States after World War II helped bring about an interdependent and overall peaceful world. Hegemons, however, tend to wane after a time, and periods of hegemonic decline are marked by strains in the system, as in the interwar period and the present. 1

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