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The rise of economic liberalism in the latter stages of the 20th century coincided with a fundamental transformation of international economic governance, especially through the law of the World Trade Organization. This book provides a new account of this transformation, and considers its enduring implications for international law. Against the commonly-held idea that ‘neoliberal’ policy prescriptions were encoded into WTO law, the book argues that the last decades of the 20th century saw a reinvention of the international trade regime, and a reconstitution of its internal structures of knowledge. In addition, the book explores the way that resistance to economic liberalism was expressed and articulated over the same period in other areas of international law, most prominently international human rights law. It considers the promise and limitations of this form of ‘inter-regime’ contestation, arguing that measures to ensure greater collaboration and cooperation between regimes may fail in their objectives if they are not accompanied by a simultaneous destabilization of each regime's structures of knowledge and characteristic features. With that in mind, the book contributes to a full and productive contestation of the nature and purpose of global economic governance.

This book examines the impact of international trade rules on the promotion and protection of human rights, and explains why human rights are an important mechanism for assessing the social justice impact of the international trading system. The core of the book is an in depth analysis of the various ways in which international trade law rules impact upon human rights protection and promotion, emphasising the significance of the jurisdictional context in which the human rights issues arise: coercive measures that are taken by one country to protect and promote human rights in another country are distinguished from measures taken by a country to protect and promote the human rights of its own population. The author contends that international trade law rules have utilised certain ad hoc mechanisms to deal with particularly pressing human rights concerns in the trade context, but also argues that these mechanisms do not provide systemic solutions to the inter-linkages between the two legal systems. The author therefore examines mechanisms by which human rights arguments could be more systematically raised and adjudicated upon in WTO dispute settlement proceedings, highlighting future opportunities and difficulties. He concludes by considering broader systemic issues outside the dispute settlement process that need to be addressed if trade law rules are to successfully protect and promote human rights.

An innovative assessment of the extent to which international judicial bodies influence domestic law and policy arrangements.

We examine the impact of political orientation on fiscal regulation and product differentiation within a spatial duopoly. Using a modelling approach a la Hotelling, we explore how the regulator’s political stance -whether pro-consumer or pro-business- affects market outcomes through distinct optimal designs of fiscal intervention. We identify three regulatory profiles: (i) pro-consumer regulation with high tax rates leading to minimal product differentiation and lower prices; (ii) pro-business regulation with no taxation resulting in maximum product differentiation and higher prices, and (iii) moderate regulation, balancing the interests of firms and consumers, in which taxes can be moderate but the firms are not induced to follow the regulator’s designated levels of differentiation. Our findings highlight the significant role of political orientation in shaping market dynamics and regulatory effectiveness, emphasising the need to consider political factors and the balancing of various actors in policy design within spatial competition models. U ovom radu ispituje se utjecaj političke orijentacije na fiskalnu regulaciju i diferencijaciju proizvoda unutar prostornog duopola. Koristeći pristup modeliranja a la Hotelling, istražujemo kako političko stajalište regulatora – bilo da je usmjereno na potrošače ili poslovanje – utječe na tržišne rezultate kroz različite optimalne fiskalne intervencije. Identificirali smo tri regulatorna profila: (i) regulacija u korist potrošača s visokim poreznim stopama koje dovode do minimalne diferencijacije proizvoda i nižih cijena; (ii) pro-poslovna regulacija bez oporezivanja što rezultira maksimalnom diferencijacijom proizvoda i višim cijenama, i (iii) umjerena regulacija, koja balansira interese tvrtki i potrošača, u kojoj porezi mogu biti umjereni, ali tvrtke nisu stimulirane da slijede naznačene razine diferencijacije regulatora. Rezultati našeg istraživanja ističu značajnu ulogu političke orijentacije u oblikovanju tržišne dinamike i regulatorne učinkovitosti pritom naglašavajući potrebu razmatranja političkih čimbenika i balansiranja različitih aktera u kreiranju politike unutar modela prostornog natjecanja.

Political favoritism affects the allocation of government resources, but is it consequential for growth? Using a close election regression discontinuity design and data from India, we measure the local economic impact of being represented by a politician in the ruling party. Favoritism leads to higher private sector employment, higher share prices of firms, and increased output as measured by night lights; the three effects are similar and economically substantive. Finally, we present evidence that politicians influence firms primarily through control over the implementation of regulation.

The global financial crisis that erupted in summer 2007 has made the reform of international prudential financial regulation one of the top priorities of global public policy. Past scholarship has usefully explained the creation and strengthening of international financial standards with reference to three policy arenas: interstate, domestic, and transnational. Despite the accomplishments of this specialist literature, the recent crisis has revealed a number of limitations in the ways scholars have understood interstate power relations, the influence of domestic politics, and the significance of transnational actors within international financial regulatory politics. Taken together, developments in each of these three arenas suggest that researchers may also need to be prepared to shift from explaining the strengthening of official international standards to analyzing their weakening in the postcrisis world. The latter task will require scholars to devote more analytical attention to a wider set of international regulatory outcomes, including “informal regulatory convergence,” “regulatory fragmentation,” and especially “cooperative regulatory decentralization.”

A growing number of respected commentators now argue that regulatory capture of public agencies and public policy by leading banks was one of the main causal factors behind the financial crisis of 2007—2009, resulting in a permissive regulatory environment. This regulatory environment placed a faith in banks own internal risk models, contributed to pro-cyclical behaviour and turned a blind eye to excessive risk taking. The article argues that a form of 'multi-level regulatory capture' characterized the global financial architecture prior to the crisis. Simultaneously, regulatory capture fed off, but also nourished the financial boom, in a fashion that mirrored the life cycle of the boom itself. Minimizing future financial booms and crises will require continuous, conscious and explicit efforts to restrain financial regulatory capture now and into the future. The article assesses the extent to which this has been achieved in current global financial governance reform efforts and highlights some of the persistent difficulties that will continue to hamper efforts to restrain regulatory capture. The evidence concerning the extent to which regulatory capture is being effectively restrained is somewhat mixed, and where it is happening it is largely unintentional and accidental. Recent reforms have overlooked the political causes of the crisis and have failed to focus explicitly or systematically on regulatory capture.

Corporate political activity is both a long-standing preoccupation and an area of innovation for sociologists. We examine the limitations of investigating business unity without focusing directly on processes and outcomes and then review studies of five types of business political action that offer lenses into corporate power in the United States: engagement in electoral politics, direct corporate lobbying, collective action through associations and coalitions, business campaigns in civil society, and political aspects of corporate responsibility. Through these avenues, we highlight four shifts since the 1970s: (a) increasing fragmentation of capitalist interests, (b) closer attention to links between business lobbying and firms' social embeddedness, (c) a turn away from the assumption that money buys political victories, and (d) new avenues of covert corporate influence. This body of research has reinvigorated the classic elitist/pluralist debate while also raising novel questions about how business actors are adapting to (and generating changes within) their sociopolitical environments.

We examine how firms use political strategies to protect economic rents created by mergers and acquisitions against dissipation by regulators. In regulated industries, regulators can impose costly merger conditions, for instance consumer rate reductions in the utilities sector, thereby reducing shareholder gains. We investigate empirically whether and how firms use election campaign contributions to politicians as a method of influencing regulatory merger approvals. In a statistical analysis of campaign contributions by all electric utilities from 1998 to 2006, we find that utilities increased their contributions in the year before they announced a merger and that merging utilities increased their contributions more in states with greater political party competition. Our findings contribute to political strategy research by providing novel evidence that firms integrate market and nonmarket strategies.

This article reviews both the theoretical and empirical literatures on regulatory capture. The scope is broad, but utility regulation is emphasized. I begin by describing the Stigler–Peltzman approach to the economics of regulation. I then open the black box of influence and regulatory discretion using a three-tier hierarchical agency model under asymmetric information (in the spirit of Laffont and Tirole, 1993). I discuss alternative modelling approaches with a view to a richer set of positive predictions, including models of common agency, revolving doors, informational lobbying, coercive pressure, and influence over committees. I discuss empirical work involving capture and regulatory outcomes. I also review evidence on the revolving-door phenomenon and on the impact that different methods for selecting regulators appear to have on regulatory outcomes. The last section contains open questions for future research.