The International Task Force on Global Public Goods has
defined “international public goods” (a term that includes both global and
regional public goods) as goods and services that “address issues that: (i) are
deemed to be important to the international community, to both developed
and developing countries; (ii) typically cannot, or will not, be adequately
addressed by individual countries or entities acting alone; and, in such cases
(iii) are best addressed collectively on a multilateral basis.”1 By this definition,
most but not all of the global issues addressed in this book involve the creation
of—or the failure to create—global public goods. We will return to the topic
of global public goods later in the chapter.