Making Global Economic Governance Effective: Hard and Soft Law Institutions in a Crowded World

Today's world is crowded with international laws and institutions that govern the global economy. This post world war two accumulation of hard multilateral and soft plurilateral institutions by no means constitutes a comprehensive and coherent system of global economic governance. Indeed, there are no genuinely global intergovernmental multilateral organizations of consequence dedicated to overseeing such critical domains as energy, investment, and competition policy. As intensifying globalization thrusts many long domestic issues onto the international stage, there is a growing need to create at the global level the more comprehensive, coherent governance system citizens of countries have long taken for granted at home. Yet the traditional means of producing such an integrated, updated, appropriate architecture for global governance are not at hand. This book offers the first comprehensive look at this critical question of international relations. It examines how and how well the multilateral organizations and the G8 are dealing with the central challenges facing the contemporary international community, how they have worked well and poorly together, and how they can work together more effectively to provide badly needed public goods.