Communication Flows in International Economic Law: The Bretton Woods Institutions – Irrelevant, Outdated and Greatly Diminished. Will There Be Demise, Adjustment or Metamorphosis?
Communication Flows in International Economic Law:
The Bretton Woods Institutions –
Irrelevant, Outdated and Greatly Diminished.
Will There Be Demise, Adjustment or Metamorphosis?
 
December is a month of retrospective reflection and so it behoves an editorial at this time to ponder the state of the Bretton Woods institutions. December is also the month of expectations generally for the future but in particular on this occasion from the change in the helms of power in the US. Have these institutions become irrelevant, given their underlying economic raison d'être of ensuring liberal trade? Are they now undermined by a geoeconomic reorganisation of the international economic order, along with the resurrection of industrial policy? Have they become outdated having not acknowledged sufficiently the changing multi-polar pattern of the distribution of international economic powers; the changing dynamics of international politics; and the pace of technological innovation? Has the IMF been diminished in its leadership of the monetary and financial spheres by the rise of China and its capacity to inject liquidity in the global monetary/financial system? Has the WTO dispute settlement system been paralysed by the ‘diminished giant syndrome’ to borrow Jagdish Bhagwati’s narrative of US behaviour in the past, along with the impending threat of US tariffs on significant competitors, by the incoming Trump administration, despite WTO rules?
 
Asif H Qureshi
Editor-in-Chief

 


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