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"The emergence of the G20 leaders' meeting during the recent global financial crisis as the 'premier forum for international economic cooperation' reflects a significant shift of hegemony over global governance towards the emerging economies but does not challenge the authority or objectives of the international financial institutions. On the contrary, successive G20 initiatives, culminating in the adoption of the Seoul Development Consensus for Shared Growth in November 2010, reveal both a further strengthening of the already close institutional relationship between the G20 and the Bretton Woods institutions and a strong shared commitment to a developmental form of global liberalism. This article charts the ascendancy of emerging economy perspectives through the lens of the G20, maps their ties to the imf and other international organisations, sets out the content of the new global developmental liberalism, and assesses the implications of emerging economy hegemony for the advanced and the emerging economies, respectively."

This special issue considers how contemporary forms of displacement in southern Africa may be approached and analysed in terms of multiple 'political economies of displacement'. Drawing insight from classic concepts of political economy, but without adher

"The development of a global form of citizenship stands in a rather tense relation with the realities of vast numbers of marginalised citizens across the globe, to the extent that marginality appears to be the hidden other of global citizenship. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a political economy of global citizenship by elaborating on some of these issues. The paper provides a critical discussion of the literature on global citizenship education using a theoretical approach that stems from political economy theories of globalisation. The notion of an emerging transnational class system will provide the starting point for understanding the processes and forces behind current forms of global structural marginalisation and their implications for the possibilities of a global citizenship."

This paper considers what happens in advanced industrial economies like that of the US, where traditional redistributive economic policies and programs have fallen out of favor, yet forces of crisis, which radicals once predicted would usher in a new, more egalitarian and democratic era, are well attenuated. It is argued that, paradoxically, as the growth potential of corporate capitalism declines and traditional redistributive mechanisms weaken, new spaces are opening up in which new, democratized forms of ownership and control of wealth are slowly emerging. After describing these developments, the paper explores the long-run possibilities and prospects their evolution may entail.

When faced with speculative pressure on their currencies, policymakers often delay devaluations by spending billions of dollars in defense of a given exchange rate peg, only to succumb and devalue their currency later on. Using a political economy approach we argue that the interaction of distributional concerns, cognitive limitations, time-consistency problems, and institutional structures can keep governments from implementing the economically optimal policy response. We argue that distributional concerns often lead to a 'bias' in favor of currency defense as long as market pressures are mild. The political incentives to initially delay devaluations can be exacerbated by institutions that either increase the size of interest groups vulnerable to depreciation or give policymakers incentives to adopt a short time-horizon. Once market pressure becomes strong, however, the politically salient alternative to not depreciating becomes raising interest rates rather than just running down reserves. This acts as a wake-up call that changes perceptions of the underlying distributional considerations and hence the political trade-off between the costs and benefits of an exchange rate defense. As the coalition of devaluation-proponents grows, the likelihood of a devaluation increases. We illustrate our argument by discussing the salient distributional issues and their interaction with domestic institutions in four brief case studies.

CAIRO | January 21, 2012 Two days before the assembly's first meeting following the thwart of Hosni Mubarak close to 1 year ago, it is apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood Islamists led by the Freedom and Justice Party emerged as the largest group in Egypt's new parliament winning 235 of the 498 elected seats in the lower house. . The new parliament, due to hold its first session on Jan. 23, "is the best celebration of the Egyptian revolution," Freedom and Justice said in a statement according to a report in Bloomberg. A breakdown of election results from party lists: 332 members of parliament Freedom and Justice - 127 Nour party - 96 Wafd party - 36 Egyptian Bloc - 33 The assembly is to select a committee that will write a new constitution, though the exact powers of parliament remain unclear. Protesters that ousted Mubarak continue to call for mass rallies on January 25, the anniversary of the beginning of the Egyptian uprising against Mubarak. And although Egyptians have had seven weeks of democratic elections, it has failed to calm tensions between activists and the military council that took power from the ousted President. The military council has said it would cede power when a president is elected in a national vote by the end of June. Due to the state of unrest and lack of tourism, Egypt's economy has seen better days. Egypt formally requested a $3.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund on Jan. 16 to help it support its economy.

"This paper postulates that a country's integration into the world economy may lower citizens' political trust. I argue that economic globalization constrains government's choice set of feasible policies, impeding responsiveness to the median voter. Matching individual-level survey data from 1981 to 2007, repeated cross-sections of altogether 260'000 persons from 80 countries, with a measure of a country's degree of economic globalization for the same time period, I find that there is a trust-lowering impact of globalization; its magnitude, however, depends on whether or not the individual is informed about politics and the economy. Trust-lowering effects of globalization are larger for those who have no interest in politics, are unwilling to indicate their political leaning, or who have low educational levels. Two-stage least squares regressions and a set of country and time fixed effects support a causal interpretation. Obviously, viewing the domestic government as accountable for its policies plays a decisive role for the relation between economic globalization and political trust. Robustness against country's degree of economic development, past globalization and different time periods is tested."

Dominant theoretical approaches in political economy today, whether they posit convergence to neoliberal capitalism, binary divergence of capitalisms, or tripartite differentiation of financial governance, downplay the importance of state action. Their me

By any measure, China's economic reform is of world-historical significance. While acknowledging the remarkable achievements China has made over the past thirty years, this introductory essay foregrounds some of the major challenges and problems China faces. Since the open-door policy was formally adopted in 1978, the country has been undergoing radical sociohistorical transformations that have created not only unprecedented wealth, new freedoms, and possibilities, but also widespread and significant inconsistencies and discontinuities that characterize the everyday life of China at the present moment. Is China's substantially marketized economy sufficient evidence of its abandonment of socialism? Is it a socialist market economy or marketized socialism? Is it a socialist state with "Chinese characteristics" or one without socialism? Would the continuation of economic reform lead to democratization? Thirty years after the reform, China has emerged as a site of paradoxes and contradictions. Contemporary China cannot be fully understood unless some of its most significant new features are identified, analyzed, and comprehended; but our attempt to understand what is unfolding in China requires an acknowledgment of the inadequacies of the accepted views and formulations about the country. By foregrounding some of those problems that this special issue of boundary 2 seeks to identify, analyze, and understand, the introduction urges for the need to move beyond the existing theoretical paradigms and categorizations for describing China's political and social formations, and to develop a more nuanced critical language for the complexities of contemporary Chinese society.

International law is currently undergoing a major transformation that has provoked a 'legal turn' in the field of International Relations. At the heart of this transformation are the juridification of international politics and subsequently the judicialisation of international law. This contribution argues that scholars of critical International Political Economy have not yet paid enough attention to this process. What is needed is a theory of international law that is able to grasp the societal implications of this transformation. In a first step some accounts drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Evgeny Pashukanis are presented, with a view to making their theory fruitful for analysing international law. Against the background of an empirical study that compares the global regulation of trade in goods with the trade in services, delivered notably through natural persons, some major shortcomings of these accounts are outlined. The last part of the contribution presents some ideas on how to further develop a critical theory of international (trade) law that introduces a communicative dimension into the legal turn with a view to distinguishing between different extra-economic dynamics

This article reviews sociological research about economic globalization's impact on work and labor in developed and developing countries since the 1980s. We find that this period of neoliberal globalization influences work because of intensified activities of multinational corporations (MNCs), financialization of the global economy, and amplified prominence of international organizations, some of which diffuse neoliberal policy scripts while others mobilize a transnational civil society. Research we review generally points to liabilities of neoliberal globalization for workers. To understand these findings, we apply Karl Polanyi's concepts of fictitious commodities, the self-regulating market, and the double movement. We propose that, on the one hand, the activities of MNCs, international financial organizations, and many states exemplify pushes for institutional separation of economy and society in effort to institutionalize the idea of a self-regulating market at a global scale, which increases labor commodification and global inequalities. On the other hand, the activities of social movements, including unions and transnational actors that target globalization's impact on work, constitute the counter movement at national and global levels resisting marketization and pushing for labor decommodification. The aftermath of the ongoing economic crisis will tell to what extent this countermovement will be successful in generating an alternative to neoliberal globalization, and more protections for workers.

"Jakob Vestergaard has produced one of the most telling analyses of the international financial architecture by deploying a broadly Foucauldian framework that invokes a novel description of neo-liberal governance, one organized around discipline, conditional exceptions and the pursuit of a 'proper economy'. This review both welcomes but challenges some of Vestergaard's analysis. In so doing it explores further the paradoxes of liberalism and the fate of sovereignty in the current international context."

"A survey of the literature on the political economy of global financial liberalization shows how little has been written on the role of the OECD, and how the Principal-Agent (PA) theory, complemented by Constructivist tools, can be applied helpfully to analyse this process. We show that the OECD's Committee on Capital Movements and Invisible Transactions (CMIT) played an entrepreneurial role in encouraging the liberalization of capital flows. In particular, we argue that the CMIT slipped by acting beyond its core delegation roles and against the preferences of the OECD member states' governments. This was done by discussing and seeking to expand the list of issue areas on which controls should be lifted to include short-term capital movements and the right of establishment, to adopt an extended understanding of reciprocity, and to eliminate a range of additional discriminatory measures on capital flows. Acting as institutional entrepreneurs, the CMIT members took advantage of the overlap among the networks in which they were engaged to spread their ideas to the member states. The CMIT's work affected the member states' willingness to make irrevocable, multilateral commitments through a combination of peer pressure and vertical institutional interconnectedness. Through the work of the CMIT, the OECD was an important actor in capital liberalization, in addition to the role played by other international organizations."

"'Information' is an enormously promising, if ambiguous term in post-Cold War development thinking. In the last three decades, international development agencies have argued that Latin American land reform policy should focus not on redistributing land but on creating more information about land and making it as widely accessible as possible. These proposals, which I call 'cadastral fixes' to rural underdevelopment, are understandably attractive and seem to fit well with democratic values of transparency and openness. But I argue that the use of the word 'information' to connote both democratic rights and the apparatuses devised by economists to improve the rural economy is misleading. 'Information' is productively vague, allowing development experts to change their projects in the face of failure without questioning the fundamental economic premises on which their reforms are built. As I show in this case study of Paraguayan cadastral reform, the history of these refinements shows a shift, under the rubric of open information, towards increasingly disciplinary forms of intervention in the politics of land."

"How does the transnationalization of markets shape institution building, particularly in those countries that have few options other than to incorporate the rules and norms promulgated by advanced industrialized countries? Building on recent advances in international and comparative political economy, we propose a framework for the comparative study of the ways in which transnational integration regimes (TIRs) shape the development of regulatory institutions in emerging market democracies. The ability of TIRs to alleviate the supply and demand problems of institutional change in these countries depends in large part on the ways in which TIRs translate their purpose and power into institutional goals, assistance and monitoring. Integration modes can be combined in different ways so as to empower or limit the participation of a variety of domestic public and private actors to pursue and contest alternative institutional experiments. We illustrate the use of our framework via a brief comparison of the impact of the European Union accession process on post-communist countries and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Mexico, with special attention to the development of food safety regulatory institutions."

"International law is currently undergoing a major transformation that has provoked a 'legal turn' in the field of International Relations. At the heart of this transformation are the juridification of international politics and subsequently the judicialisation of international law. This contribution argues that scholars of critical International Political Economy have not yet paid enough attention to this process. What is needed is a theory of international law that is able to grasp the societal implications of this transformation. In a first step some accounts drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Evgeny Pashukanis are presented, with a view to making their theory fruitful for analysing international law. Against the background of an empirical study that compares the global regulation of trade in goods with the trade in services, delivered notably through natural persons, some major shortcomings of these accounts are outlined. The last part of the contribution presents some ideas on how to further develop a critical theory of international (trade) law that introduces a communicative dimension into the legal turn with a view to distinguishing between different extra-economic dynamics."

Buoyed by its creditor's hold on the United States and its ability to withstand the harsh winds of recession blowing from across the Pacific, China has graduated in its own mind from an emerging economy to a world power. From their confrontation with Goog

The books under review, though offering important advances in understanding their particular issue areas of global governance, together reproduce a number of liberal political-economic silences that obscure key power relations, a process made visible through resistance. These silences privilege the formal public-private sphere of civil society over both alternative expressions of social agency and the continuing importance of state sovereignty, leading to false claims of wider participation, partnership and empowerment in global politics and also unexpected social and environmental consequences. Hajnal, P. I. (2007) The G8 System and the G20: Evolution, Role and Documentation. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mattli, W. and Woods, N. (eds) (2009) The Politics of Global Regulation. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Hall, R. B. (2008) Central Banking as Global Governance: Constructing Financial Credibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singh, J. P. (2008) Negotiation and the Global Information Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Arab region finds itself at a historical cross-road between resilience and resistance to globalization. Arab countries' short-term strategies to globalization are primarily determined by the diversification of their respective economies. Long-term adj

Director-General Pascal Lamy, in introducing his third monitoring report to the Trade Policy Review Body on 13 July 2009, said "at a time when the global economy is still fragile worldwide and in the face of the unprecedented decline in trade flows, we mu