Legacies and innovations in global economic governance since Bretton Woods

Abstract

The international economic system that emerged after the 1944 Bretton Woods conference became the most durable international arrangement devoted to economic openness. Seventy-five years after the conference, however, global shifts in power, institutional gridlock, and populist backlash figure prominently in accounts predicting the system's demise. This article examines the legacies of the Bretton Woods conference for structures and practices of global economic governance and innovations that emerged over time to adapt the system to new political and economic circumstances. It explores how and why the Bretton Woods system became a more variegated system over time with respect to four features of governance: membership, legalization, organizational focality, and market embeddedness. It identifies sources and effects of expanding membership in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the emergence of new formal and informal institutions, the challenges of a more fragmented institutional landscape, and shifts in the underlying principles of economic governance. Finally, the article discusses lessons from past crises in and reforms to the Bretton Woods system, and their implications for understanding recent challenges to global economic cooperation.

Policy Norms, the Development Finance Regime Complex, and Holding the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to Account

“…In this article I investigate how the EBRD came to adopt rules and obligations consistent with other MDBs (Park, 2017), as a means of demonstrating how coherence is produced within the development finance regime. This supports institutionalist research that points to the role of ideas, networks, learning and endogenous feedback loops that occur within the development finance regime complex (Fioretos and Heldt, 2019). It also supports the importance of state action driving institutional inter‐play (Henning, 2019), while recognising that both state and nonstate actors create behavioural expectations and institutional practices.…”

Legitimacy challenges to the liberal world order: Evidence from United Nations speeches, 1970–2018

“…Finally, a high proportion of leaders voiced criticisms and challenges towards international institutions. Importantly, critiques rapidly escalated in the early-1970s, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and the 1973 oil crisis—combined, these events created important balance-of-payments problems for many developing countries (Fioretos and Heldt 2019 ; Helleiner 2019 ). In May 1974 the UNGA adopted a resolution proclaiming the establishment of a New International Economic Order, and—a few months later—we observe a large increase in the proportion of General Debate speeches critical towards the global economic order: an increase from 20% in 1973 to over 50% in 1974.…”

Reforming International Organizations

“…However, given the United States' role as the Bank's largest net donor, we include this country in our analysis. 8 Coen and Pegram 2015;Fioretos and Heldt 2019;Heldt and Mahrenbach 2018;Schmidtke 2019a, 2019b;Mahrenbach 2013Mahrenbach , 2015Mahrenbach , 2019b ment finance.9 Yet other scholars have underlined the role played by domestic factors, including national norms, foreign policy strategies, interest groups and civil society pressure.10 In this article, we add to this literature by focusing on two neglected domestic factors-partisan politics and ministry control-to explain state preferences toward Bank reforms. Two logics in the existing literature explain how political parties affect international cooperation and, thus, how partisanship may be linked with state preferences toward IOE.…”