Why we need an economics grounded in the common good

From the 'season of superlatives' to the season of change

As we close 2024, we find ourselves living through what my friend and Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley calls "the season of superlatives" – a year marked by record-breaking extremes: the hottest global temperatures, the most devastating floods, the worst droughts. These records are not just statistics - they are symptoms of our failing economic system and urgent calls for transformative change.

Last month, building on my appointment to the Pontifical Academy for Life last year, I convened a dialogue at the Vatican with Prime Minister Mottley of Barbados and received a special written message from Pope Francis to explore how economics can better serve humanity and our planet. The timing was deliberate - at a moment when our multilateral institutions continue to fall short in addressing our greatest challenges, we gathered to discuss something more fundamental: the need to reshape our entire economic framework around the pursuit of common purpose.

Take the climate crisis as an example. As my recent report for the G20 argued, G20 countries are responsible for 80% of current and past greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions and they should be responsible for 80% of the emissions reductions needed to achieve the 1.5°C goal. Yet the problem is not a lack of finance, knowledge, or technology – it is an absence of leadership grounded in public purpose and guided by a framework for the common good.

In the video I argue that the common good means going beyond the public good. While the public good is a correction, the common good is an objective where ‘how’ it is reached matters as much as the ‘what’. The inertia in achieving ambitious goals, like decarbonizing our economies, is not by coincidence but by design. Current economic policy is severely restricted by economic theory that minimizes the role of the state in shaping markets and directing growth. The common good offers a useful framework both for setting shared goals and for working out how to achieve them.

We do not have the global cooperation frameworks required to tackle the climate crisis. Countries in the global south face what Mottley calls “a double jeopardy”: they are disproportionately affected by the consequences of climate change, largely caused by the historical emissions of the global north, but they now lack the funds to respond to the threat caused by a dysfunctional and inequitable international financial architecture. On average, low-income countries allocate more than twice as much money to servicing their debt as they do to social assistance, and 1.4 times more than to healthcare. The Bridgetown Initiative, led by Mottley and the Antonio Guterres (UN Secretary General), demands that we stop “tinkering at the margins of a broken system.”

The significance of our Vatican dialogue was powerfully captured in Pope Francis's written message for us, delivered by Archbishop Paglia: "This evening two women with different responsibilities and backgrounds will take to the stage. In society as in the Church, we need to hear women's voices; we need different forms of knowledge to cooperate in view of formulating a broad and wise reflection on the future of humankind."

Because the multilateral system echoes the logic of the entire economic system, replacing it will require a more fundamental change: we must broaden the economic thinking that has long underpinned institutional mandates.

As I argue in my article on the Common Good (and explain in the clip below), his new economics of the common good must be based on five pillars: purpose and directionality; co-creation and participation; collective learning and knowledge-sharing; access for all and reward-sharing; and transparency and accountability. Examining how we governed the Covid Pandemic can give us insight into what we got wrong and how a common good approach could have helped.

First, purpose and directionality means providing a unified mission, focusing on equitable access to vaccines and health resources globally, rather than allowing national interests to dominate. Countries pursued the wrong mission: it was not to create vaccines, but to vaccinate the world. Co-creation and participation means facilitating collaboration across countries, ensuring all voices were heard, including lower-income nations, rather than perpetuating what WHO Director General Dr. Tedros called "vaccine apartheid.”

The pillar of collective learning and knowledge-sharing means encouraging open exchange of research and vaccine technology, addressing challenges posed by restrictive intellectual property rights that limited access in the global south. Access for all and reward-sharing means ensuring that benefits, such as vaccine efficacy data and distribution rights, are shared with all countries, making it easier to coordinate a rapid, widespread response.

Lastly, transparency and accountability means reinforcing public trust and ensure that international institutions acted with clarity and accountability, allowing for coordinated, transparent governance that prioritized global health​. This approach could prevent unequal access issues and create a resilient, cooperative system for future crises.

Take, for instance, our work with the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, where we are applying these principles to rethink how we value and govern one of humanity's most essential common goods. We are witnessing firsthand how this framework can transform our approach to global challenges. I will share a more detailed analysis of this work and its implications in the new year, but it exemplifies how treating something as a common good - rather than just managing market failures - fundamentally changes both what we do and how we do it.

The common good approach can also help address our health challenges in a more equitable way. During the COVID-19 pandemic, 73% of vaccines went to high-income countries, while only 0.9% reached low-income countries, exacerbating global health inequality​. The WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, which I chaired from 2021 to 2023 called for partnerships between government and business that maximize public value by ensuring affordability and accessibility. For example, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, developed with $1.3 billion in public funds, included conditionalities to ensure it could be stored at room temperature and profits could not be made during the pandemic, unlike Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine​.

Many are calling for changes to our multilateral system. The Bridgetown Initiative advocates a "New Consensus" between wealthier and less wealthy countries. Similarly, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for a "Common Agenda" – a roadmap for global intergovernmental cooperation aimed at moving from "ideas to action."

At this time of year, when we traditionally reflect on community, generosity, and collective purpose, it's worth considering how we might reshape our economic system to better serve these values year-round. As I prepare to begin my sabbatical in the new year, during which I'll be focusing on finishing my upcoming book "An Economics of the Common Good" (to be published in 2026), I remain deeply committed to this work.

As I take time over the holidays to work on these ideas, I remain deeply hopeful about our collective capacity for change. If this truly is a season of superlatives, let's make 2025 remarkable not just for the records we're breaking, but for how we come together to address them. I look forward to sharing more of this work with you in the new year as we continue to develop, test and implement this new approach to economics - one that genuinely serves the common good.

As Pope Francis wrote in his address for our event,

"[t]he pursuit of the common good and justice are essential and indispensable for the defense of all human life, especially of the most fragile and defenseless, and for the respect of the entire ecosystem that we inhabit."

Wishing you a peaceful holiday season,

Mariana