Global economic order and global economic governance

This issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy explores the origins of the US-led liberal multilateral economic order in the post-war world and the threats which that order now faces, drawing on contributions from two different groups of people—academic international relations (IR) scholars and international economists. This introductory essay attempts to weave the various strands of this intellectual collaboration together. First, it provides a narrative history of how economic collaboration emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. Second, it describes the nature of the global economic governance that emerged and provides a new formal framework for analysing it, making use of the idea of ‘concerted unilateralism’. Third, it explores how contemporary challenges—a broadening of policy requirements, the rise of economic nationalism, and the rise of China as a new hegemon—mean that the global economic order is now in flux. And finally, it concludes with a general observation that runs through the paper: that IR scholars are inclined to analyse international economic regimes, economists to study particular policy proposals, and that these two perspectives can—and should—complement one another.