Press Releases 1998

[Index]

ECONOMICS AND SECURITY: UN/ECE MEETS WITH OSCE

12 November 1998

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) organised on 11 November 1998 a one-day seminar on economic aspects of international security. This brainstorming seminar intended to be a UN/ECE contribution to the on-going discussion on the economic dimension of the Charter on European Security, now being prepared under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The main objective of the seminar, organized in consultation with the OSCE, was to help both organizations better understand the complex relationship between economic change and political stability and to discuss how OSCE can cooperate with international economic institutions so as to enable it to best fulfil its four interrelated functions of: prediction and early warning, conflict prevention, conflict management and post-conflict rehabilitation from an economic standpoint.

"Economic aspects are of particular importance in the process of predicting and preventing conflicts, as well as in post-conflict rehabilitation" stresses Mr. Yves Berthelot, Executive Secretary of the UN/ECE. "While there is now a sufficient supply of analytical and statistical data on the economic development of individual countries (from sources such as the IMF, OECD, UN/ECE, the World Bank and others), no analytical framework has yet been developed to use these data for the purposes of early warning and prediction of conflicts". Also, conflict prevention in most cases tends to be limited to preventive political diplomacy, without systematic attempts to directly address the economic roots of potential conflicts, for instance through preemptive economic assistance programmes.

The meeting highlighted the very constructive cooperation between OSCE and ECE. The latter has been providing inputs to the annual OSCE Economic Forum and seminars while the former has given political impulses to the activities of ECE.

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