A former banker and staff member of the International Monetary Fund, Louis W. Pauly explains why people are deeply concerned about the emergence of a global economy and the increasingly integrated capital markets at its heart. In nations as diverse as France, Canada, Russia, and Mexico, the lives of citizens are disrupted when national policy falls out of line with the expectations of international financiers. Such dilemmas, ever more conspicuous around the world, arise from the disjuncture between a rapidly changing international economic system and a political order still constituted by sovereign states. The evolution of global capital markets inspires an understandable fear among people that the governing authorities accountable to them are losing the power to make substantive decisions affecting their own material prospects and those of their children. Pauly points out that today's capital markets resulted from decisions taken over many years by sovereign states, and particularly by the leading industrial democracies, who simultaneously crafted the instrument of multilateral economic surveillance. The effort to build adequate political foundations for global capital markets spans the twentieth century and links the histories of such institutions as the League of Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the Group of Seven.
Louis W. Pauly is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the coeditor of Governing the World's Money and the author of Opening Financial Markets: Banking Politics on the Pacific Rim, both from Cornell, and coauthor or coeditor of several other books, including Complex Sovereignty.
Table of Contents
1. Global Markets and National Politics2. The Political Economy of International Capital Mobility3. The League of Nations and Roots of Multilateral Oversight4. The Transformation of Economic Oversight in the League5. Global Aspirations and the Early International Monetary Fund6. The Reinvention of Multilateral Economic Surveillance7. The Political Foundations of Global MarketsNotesSelected BibliographyIndex
What People are Saying About This
Benjamin J. Cohen
This is a first-rate book. Eminently readable, it provides important historical material and makes a number of salient analytical points.
Robert Solomon
Louis Pauly provides us with a lively history of the problems and dilemmas created in a world of growing economic and financial interdependence among politically independent nations. His plea for collaboration and coordination, via multilateral surveillance by the IMF, is well based and deserves wide support.
Manuel Guitián
"This book provides an insightful analysis of the development of an international institutional structure to guide country cross-border financial and economic relationships. As such, it is clearly necessary reading for all those interested in keeping abreast of the opportunities opened, and the constraints set, by a progressively integrated world financial environment."
Ian D. Clark
Louis Pauly brings an insider's knowledge and an economic historian's perspective to bear on an issue of growing concern to democratic nation-states. His highly readable analysis of developments in the sometimes arcane field of international finance challenges the conventional wisdom and concludes with a prediction of when and why 'the retreat from global markets will begin.'
Harold James
Pauly has written a fascinating book, rich in analysis and with great historical depth, which explains the logic underlying the idea of surveillance of the international monetary system through international organizations.
Manuel Guitián
This book provides an insightful analysis of the development of an international institutional structure to guide country cross-border financial and economic relationships. As such, it is clearly necessary reading for all those interested in keeping abreast of the opportunities opened, and the constraints set, by a progressively integrated world financial environment.
Miles Kahler
Surveillance is once more in fashion as we confront the risks of an integrated global financial system. Louis Pauly has written an essential introduction to the history and practice of multilateral surveillance in this century.
