Call for Papers: UNCTAD’s Principles on Responsible Sovereign Borrowing and Lending

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid have issued a call for papers for a conference on "UNCTAD’s Principles on Responsible Sovereign Borrowing and Lending." The call can be found here. Here's the idea:

The causes and widespread negative effects of the global financial and economic crisis prompted UNCTAD to launch an initiative in 2009 to promote responsible sovereign lending and borrowing practices. The purpose of UNCTAD's initiative is to provide a forum for debate on responsible practices and to develop a set of commonly accepted principles and practices relating to sovereign financing.

An expert group was established to contribute to the process of drafting these Principles. The group is composed of world renowned legal and economic experts, private investors and NGOs. Senior representatives from the IMF, the World Bank and Paris Club participate as observers of this group. After several formal meetings and exchanges of ideas a draft of the Principles emerged. This document is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish here.

As this draft is intended to be a point of departure for international discourse and will be subject to further discussions with governments, UNCTAD and the UAM (through its schools of Law and Economics, with the support of the project DER2009-11436 on ‘global legal goods’) will organize a conference to discuss in depth the foundations, implications and perspectives of these Principles and the problems they are designed to address.

Since sovereign lending and borrowing require an interdisciplinary and pluralist approach, the conference will encourage discussion among scholars and experts from different disciplines and backgrounds, focusing on economic, financial, institutional and legal issues. The UNCTAD’s initiative being novel in several ways, original and innovative research is especially encouraged.

The conference will take place in the campus of the UAM in 2 March 2012. The preliminary program will be available online as soon as the first selection of papers has been processed. Papers selected will be published in a collective book, one edition in English and another one in Spanish.