This Focus Report begins with a brief appraisal of the progress on the implementation of the Rio Agreements and subsequent relevant UN Conferences. The author shares the general opinion that the record is mixed: high on formal action and promises, low on real commitments and tangible implementation.

The activities of the International Ocean Institute (IOI) are appraised in this broader context.

Critical issues and priorities are seen to be of a theoretical as well as of an institutional nature.

Intellectual inertia appears to be blocking progress towards a genuinely new economic order. The very nature of the oceans, however, which has forced the international community to think innovatively with regard to the legal order, will oblige it equally to think innovatively with regard to the socio-economic order.

The "economics of the Common Heritage" will have to acknowledge that:

1. a large proportion of the wealth of the ocean is based on a non-property and non-sovereignty concept;
2. a large proportion of the value of the ocean is nonquantifiable;
3. uncertainty and vulnerability, and therefore, risk are far greater in the ocean environment than on land; and new thinking, emerging from insurance economics, may play, in our time, the pioneering role that the economics of the textile industry played during the early phase of the industrial revolution;
4. intellectual property rights may have to be harmonised with the requirements of sustainable development
5. to be "sustainable," ocean and coastal management, based on the new "ocean economics" will have to contribute to a solution of the most pressing socio/economic problems in coastal areas where the majority of human populations are concentrated: the problem of employment in the industrialized states; the problem of poverty alleviation in the developing countries;
6. the time may have come for systems of international taxation. Entities other than States (multinational corporations) are new actors on the stage of international relations: which may imply new financial responsibilities vis a vis the international community; The Law of the Sea Convention has elevated the principle of international taxation to a norm of international law.
7. the "economics of the Common Heritage" transcends both "capitalism" and "socialism," both rooted in the early phase of the European industrial revolution and reflecting a European value system. The "economics of the Common Heritage" in fact transcends economics as a separate discipline and re-integrates it into a wider, social, political cultural and ethical context reflecting different cultural value systems.

The design of such a system should fully utilize existing institutions and abstain from creating new bureaucracies and additional financial burdens.

A system such as envisaged in this Report is already clearly in the making. It represents the most advanced point in the evolution of national/international organisation and may have an important impact on the evolution of world order in the next century.

International Ocean Institute
Dalhousie University
1226 LeMarchant Street
Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 3P7
CANADA
Tel: +1 902 494-1737
Fax: +1 902 494-2034
E-Mail: ioihfx@is.dal.ca