The Global Marshall Plan is a plan first devised by Former American Vice-President Al Gore in his bestselling novel Earth in the Balance which gives specific ideas on how to save the global environment.
Gore states: "The model of the Marshall Plan can be of great help. For example, a Global Marshall Plan must focus on strategic goals and emphasize actions and programs that are likely to remove the bottlenecks presently inhibiting the healthy functioning of the global economy. The new global economy must be an inclusive system that does not leave entire regions behind. The new plan will require the wealthy nations to allocate money for transferring environmentally helpful technologies to the Third World and to help impoverished nations achieve a stable population and a new pattern of sustainable economic progress. To work, however, any such effort will also require wealthy nations to make a transition themselves that will be in some ways more wrenching than that of the Third World."
Source: Earth in the Balance, page 297-301
What is the Global Marshall Plan?
The Global Marshall Plan aims at a "World in Balance". To achieve this we need a better design of globalization and the global economic processes - a worldwide Eco-Social Market Economy. This is a matter of an improved global structural framework, sustainable development, the eradication of poverty, environmental protection and equity, altogether resulting in a new global 'economic miracle'.
A World in Balance
The Global Marshall Plan includes the following five core goals:
Why do we need a Global Marshall Plan?
Because today's global situation is scandalous, and because the current conditions of globalization produce the complete opposite of what is constantly demanded in rosy speeches. Poverty, the north south divide, migration, terror, wars, cultural conflicts, and environmental catastrophes are all problems, which can no longer be resolved nationally under the conditions of a widely unregulated globalization process. Therefore, we need an improved and binding global framework for the world economy, that brings economy into harmony with society, culture, and environment.
Millennium Development Goals and Worldwide Eco-Social Market Economy
The Global Marshall Plan considers the realization of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which were signed by 189 nations in 2000, to be an important first step. The following goals should be achieved by 2015:
The Millennium Development Goals
In order to create a World in Balance a worldwide Eco-Social Market Economy with globally binding social, ecological, and cultural standards is required. The Global Marshall Plan combines a functional and coherent global governance structure with appropriate reforms and intelligent interlinking of UN, WTO, IMF, World Bank and ILO and UNEP standards with the raising of an additional 100 billion US$ a year in order to co-finance development. The enlargement process of the European Union serves as a conceptual model for combining co-financing and the compliance with eco-social standards. This enlargement, however, requires a better financial support than it is the case in the current enlargement round.
Funding
In addition to the creation of fair competitive conditions in the agricultural sector and improved North-South cooperation in this sector as well as reasonable methods of debt relief for the less and least developed countries, the Global Marshall Plan focuses on new financial funding sources. They are based on global added value processes and therefore neither strain domestic economies nor distort competition. Possible financing mechanisms are a Terra-Tax on world-wide trade, a levy on global financial transactions, trade with equal per capita emission rights, a cerosine tax, or Special Drawing Rights with the IMF.
Appropriation of Funds
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of a Global Marshall Plan is finding an effective way of translating money into development. Concrete examples are micro-financing, renewable energies, and cooperation with local development workers.
