Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh's article was published in the compendium brought out by the G-8 nations on the eve of their summit in Italy.

As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the challenges of global governance in an increasingly inter-connected and multi-polar world are truly formidable. Our institutions of global governance, centered on what may be called the UN system, were designed for the most part at the end of the Second World War and reflected the politico-economic realities of that age. The world was then dominantly bipolar, in the political and military sense, international trade and international capital flows were low, the developing countries were not economically important, indeed most of them were not even independent.

There has been a sea-change since then. Bipolarity has given way to multi-polarity, the developing countries are not only sovereign states but some group of developing countries have gained in relative economic importance and this trend will only gain momentum. The world has also become much more interconnected through the expansion of trade in goods and services and expansion of financial flows generated by capital account liberalization. Interconnection has in turn greatly increased problems of contagion and vulnerability especially through financial linkages.

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