What was intended to be a global growth pact quickly bogged down in “currency wars.” The result is that growth is much lower than it need be and I estimate we have lost between 25 and 50 million jobs. Much-needed global initiatives, such as an infrastructure plan to mobilize private savings and generate higher growth, are stillborn.

The failure to secure a world trade agreement

Negotiations on a new world trade round have also broken down. Some may argue that it’s impossible to agree on what to do because the nature of imports and exports — and of global supply chains — is changing so fast. Yet each successful trade round since the 1940s has had to deal with a rapidly changing world.

Today the world is being remade yet again. Intra-Asian trade, which is now about a third of intra-European trade, will surpass European trade before 2030. China, which has less than 5 percent of world trade today, will have 15 percent by 2030. India’s share will rise from less than 2 percent to 5 percent.

Given their need to sell to rising Asian markets, my view is that more than ever before free trade is in the interests of America and Europe. Yet we face the prospect that, for the first time in 40 years of trade negotiations, protectionist pressures will make a world trade deal impossible.

The failure to deliver the millennium development goals

In 2000 every major world leader and every significant international institution agreed to deliver, by 2015, education for every child, a two-thirds reduction in infant mortality, and a three-quarters reduction in maternal mortality on top of a halving of poverty in every continent. They promised to secure gender equality by 2005.

Despite big progress in reducing poverty in China, none of these bold health and education goals are on track to being met. One reason I have accepted the U.N. secretary general’s offer to be his special envoy for global education is that, unless we fast track resources to meeting these goals from now to the end of 2015, one generation’s betrayal will haunt the next. The credibility of the post-2015 goals will depend on how much we do in the next three years to meet the current goals.

In five central areas where policy coordination is essential, the world has not moved forward with sufficient force; indeed, in certain important respects it has moved backward.