Progressive Trade Policy in a Changing Global Order

30-31 October 2025 | New York City

FES with IPD co-presidents Joseph E. Stiglitz and Martín Guzmán, convened leading economists, policymakers, and trade analysts for a groundbreaking workshop on "Progressive Trade Policy in a Changing Global Order." Across five intensive sessions, participants confronted the exhaustion of neoliberal orthodoxy and the rise of protectionist nationalism, developing concrete alternatives for global economic governance.

The workshop addressed critical challenges: reclaiming policy space for equitable development, reforming WTO institutions around fairness and differentiated obligations, integrating geopolitical awareness into economic strategy, redesigning financial and monetary architecture to reduce dollar dependency, and embedding labor justice and democratic oversight into trade frameworks. 

Participants reframed progressive trade as a constitutional project for global economic democracy, establishing key principles including differentiated reciprocity, climate-linked industrial policy, and monetary pluralism. The discussions emphasized that transformation begins domestically through fiscal capacity and social legitimacy, expanding regionally via pragmatic alliances before reaching multilateral reform. 

The outcome will be a strategic policy paper pointing beyond critique to systemic design and uniting technical reform with a coherent narrative of fairness, cooperation, and sustainability, a framework to give progressive actors concrete mechanisms and coalition-building strategies to approach the current trade landscape toward constructive renewal of the global economic order.