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This chapter examines the global governance of issue-areas affecting the underlying causes of movement notably in areas such as peace and security and global economic governance. It argues that an understanding of the international institutions that regulate the areas that underlie human mobility is crucial for understanding global migration governance. The chapter takes an international political economy approach, suggesting that the existing governance structures need to be seen in the context of North–South relations and that many of the inequalities that exist in forums such as the WTO and the Bretton Woods institutions themselves underpin the causes of human mobility.

The politics, rules, and institutions of cooperation among nations have not kept up with the demands from global citizens for changes in the global political order. Whether norms and policies can make the global politics of managing the global economy more effective, more legitimate, and more responsive to the needs of the bottom half of the world’s population, for whom life remains harsh, remains to be seen. There is some cause for optimism, however: citizens everywhere are becoming more aware of and active in seeking changes in the global norms and rules that could make the global system and the global economy fairer-in processes if not outcomes-and less environmentally harmful.

The chapter offers a critical analysis of the call for policy convergence in Competition Law. This merely emanates from the global business community and enables established Competition Law regimes, such as those of the United States and Europe, to influence the convergence point and take ownership of the process. This does not take into account the different patterns of diffusion of Competition Law and consequently the variety of Competition Law systems globally. The chapter castigates the lack of participation in this global deliberative space of emergent and developing economies and the inability of various affected interests, beyond global businesses and to a limited extent consumers, to be considered. Taking a participation-centered approach, the chapter argues that global antitrust governance should not aim to policy convergence as such, but to increasing levels of ‘total trust’. Establishing a BRICS Joint Research Platform in Competition Law could a first step in this process.

This chapter sums up the results of the analyses offered in this book, pointing out praxis-related issues of, and persisting challenges to, international harmonization. The most serious challenge faced by international harmonization is securing its legitimacy both domestically and internationally. Implications of international harmonization for the theory of international economic law and global economic governance are discussed emphasizing the following: Harmonization efforts have (1) blurred the distinction between international law and domestic law, (2) blurred the distinction between hard law and soft law and (3) necessitate a rethinking of the status of non-state actors, notably private firms, in the making and implementation of harmonized regulation. These implications call for further elaboration of theories of international economic law and global economic governance. The book concludes with an exposition of the author’s view on the prospects of international harmonization in the near future.

This chapter considers the objectives of transnational economic and social governance and the system designed, initially in 1945, to advance these objectives. Despite evolving over seven decades in response to growing global economic interconnectedness and the need for expanded management capabilities, the system for global economic and social governance, anchored within the United Nations, falls woefully short in promoting a vision and practical policies for achieving “just security,” as introduced in this volume. The chapter proposes a remedy for the inadequacies in the present system by tackling head-on issues of effectiveness, representativeness, and legitimacy, including through the creation of a new Global Economic Coordination Council (that, over time, absorbs the current functions and mandate of the G20) and specific UN Economic and Social Council reforms.

This chapter uses international relations theory to conceptualize the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as a club emulating the incumbent world powers. The BRICS operate as an informal club to increase their bargaining power and influence global economic governance. They are motivated by their common aversions to the dominant power of the G7, particularly the United States, and challenges to their autonomy. These five countries press to have a greater voice within existing multilateral institutions, including the major international financial institutions, while pursuing the outside option of founding parallel multilateral institutions. Given China’s disproportionate strength within this club, this asymmetry of capabilities among the members has enabled China to dominate their internal decisions. Nonetheless, the other members continue to find value in their collaboration with China. In adopting this stance, China within the BRICS presents some echoes of the role played by the United States within the G7.

This concluding chapter argues that many emerging-market and developing countries (EMDs) were able to reregulate cross-border finance and create more policy room to maneuver in global economic governance institutions. These policy changes, however, did not result in strong economic outcomes which it was hoped would fully mitigate the surges and sudden stops of capital flows in the wake of the crisis. Domestic as well as international political forces—that some countries were able to countervail—are the reasons why some nations were not able to provide adequate policy space to regulate capital flows under the current system of global economic governance.

Inefficient and illegitimate institutions may persist, despite the greater efficiency of alternatives. Stickiness, path dependence, and vested interests are crucial factors that may account for the lack of adaptation to new circumstances. Nowhere is this logic more extensively explored than within historical institutionalism, and nowhere is this pattern more vividly illustrated than in the internal governance arrangements of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose decision-making structures reflect the economic reality of the mid-1940s. Today, they fail to reflect the global economic reality of the twenty-first century, which is characterized by increasing power shifts between developed and developing countries. This chapter employs insights from the historical and sociological institutional traditions to account for the elusive quest to fundamentally reform the formal governance of the IMF and World Bank, especially since 2008 when, in spite of the shifts in global power balances, the organizations have experienced only limited reform.

The G20 brings together leaders of the twenty systemically most important economies to discuss global issues in an informal setting. As a network it does not have the formal decision-making procedures and rules of procedure that characterize traditional international organizations and its output takes the form of communiqués and declarations, generating interesting forms of ‘informal law-making’. However, the G20 does interact in a number of ways with other international organizations. A prominent example of such co-operation are the semi-annual trade reports that are compiled by the WTO, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and which monitor the compliance of G20 Members with their commitments to resist protectionism. This chapter takes a further look at the interaction between the G20 and the WTO. The interplay between both international organizations will be critically assessed through a four-faceted lens, looking at (i) complementary effect; (ii) competitive effect; (iii) rebalancing effect; and (iv) replacement effect.

This chapter cautions against the temptation to see the role of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in global economic governance mostly in terms of what we wish they were doing rather than for what they truly are. It considers whether the political systems that harbor SWFs are able to create a space for SWFs to allow them to operate in the best interests of their citizens and the global economy. In particular, can the political system credibly support a form of independence for SWFs similar to central bank independence? The chapter concludes by pointing to the importance of political risk for SWFs, which is as important as economic and climate risk.

The present chapter extends the goal-based analytic framework applied in Parts II and III of the book to an additional category of disputes filed with the World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement System (DSS)—those reflecting the growing friction between the WTO’s multilateral trade regime and the network of regional trade agreements (RTAs) proliferating around the globe. Looking at a series of prominent RTA-related cases that came before the WTO DSS, the extensive analysis carried out in this chapter shows that the dynamic reality of goal shifts and goal conflicts experienced within the DSS is not unique to trade-and and perennial disputes. Similar processes can be observed in the histories of other classes of WTO disputes, an analysis of which is likely to disclose different DSS goal-attainment patterns evidencing new goal priorities and trade-offs, and resulting in varying dimensions of judicial effectiveness and ineffectiveness, adjusted to the new operational environments.

What is treaty shopping, and how may ‘legitimate nationality planning’ be distinguished from ‘abusive treaty shopping’ in international investment law? This is the question that investment arbitral tribunals have increasingly face, yet have often been at pains to find a coherent approach towards this distinction that may decide over whether the claimant crosses the jurisdictional hurdle or not. This is unsurprising, given the absence of a doctrine of precedent in international investment arbitration and the often similarly, but not identically, worded key clauses in thousands of agreements. However, the importance of this practice transcends the outcome of concrete arbitral cases. In times of heightened public scepticism towards the current global economic governance system, treaty shopping may be perceived as contributing to a mounting ‘legitimacy crisis’ the international investment arbitration system has been facing for years. If this crisis further escalates, this could deeply impact the system in its current form.