Mumbai: British prime minister Gordon Brown has called for reform of the 60-year-old international institutions, including the UN, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to make them relevant for a global economy.

Setting out his vision for reform of the United Nations and its sister institutions, which were set up after the Second World war, Brown said the UN should also become more effective in preventing conflicts as well as stabilising and reconstructing failed states.

Brown also wanted the IMF to become an effective early warning system to prevent the sort of problems which have led to the current global financial crisis.

He said the recent problems in the global economy are proof that the world needs new tools to cope with wide-scale problems.

"The international order that we have with the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund was built in 1945 for the problems of 1945," Brown told the National Public Radio yesterday.

''The world order has now changed altogether and there is, therefor, a need to reform these institutions,'' he said.

Those institutions "were built to deal with national governments with sheltered economies, without global flows of capital" and not interconnected economies, he said.

"We know that the problems happening in one country have huge affects on other countries, but we have national supervisors to deal with global flow of capital. And we know also there could be greater international coordination when we are dealing with monetary fiscal and financial stability polices," Brown said.

He also called for combined efforts to solve the current economic problems, including rising food prices in Asia and volatile oil prices.

"We have a combination of problems that can only be properly addressed at a global level,"  Brown said.

The World Bank, he said, also needs an environmental edge, providing funds for developing nations to adopt "green" technologies.