With Stephen Sexauer
How is the global economy governed? By whom and for what ends? What’s next?
Martin Daunton’s ambitious book, The Economic Government of the World 1933–2023, starts at a world economic conference in London in 1933, with a battered world picking up the pieces resulting from the human, economic, and financial catastrophes tied to the First World War and the Great Depression. For the first time in modern history, the individual leaders of sixty-six nations were dealing with consequences of war and depression that were global, not regional.
Daunton, a University of Cambridge (UK) professor, then takes us through the next ninety years and the birth of global economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Trade Organization. The list of these and similar organizations is a surprising two-plus pages long. He details their roles – then and now – in the governance of global trade; banking and finance; sovereign currencies; taxation; and the quest for food, minerals, and energy.
Along the way we learn that today’s big issues – income inequality and social justice – are at the core of many of these multilateral institutions as the world looks for governmental structures to deal with the enormous, although shrinking, gap between the developed and emerging economies.
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