The new map of international financial institutions

The international economic order has undergone far-reaching changes since 2009 in response to the global financial crisis and to its consequences in the economic, financial and regulatory spheres. This period has seen the re-design of the governance and policies of the traditional institutions that arose from the Bretton Woods agreements — namely the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and the International Trade Organization (ITO) — and the emergence of new institutions, at both the global and regional scale, all of them under the stewardship of a reinforced G20, which has taken the reins of international economic coordination. As a result, the new map of international economic relations has taken shape, characterised by the greater weight of the emerging economies (in keeping with their growing importance in the global economy), greater institutional complexity (with the proliferation of regional arrangements), a greater volume of resources and the development of new instruments and strategies. Playing a key role in this new map are the international economic bodies, which may be classified in four major blocks in terms of their principal mission in the global framework: institutions geared chiefly to maintaining economic and financial stability, i.e. to crisis management and crisis prevention (such as the IMF); institutions geared to promoting growth and development (development banks); trade agreements (WTO and multilateral integration agreements) and surveillance and regulation bodies, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and the Financial Stability Board (FSB).1 This article addresses the main defining elements of this map of international relations, paying particular attention to the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), in which we include, for the purposes of this article, the first two blocks: institutions geared to maintaining stability and those focusing on the development of growth strategies. In the second and third sections we review the changes made to both sets of institutions. We then look at the new global strategies underpinning the growing coordination and interconnectedness of IFIs, in particular the G20 growth strategy and the new sustainable development goals (SDGs).