Miroslava Filipović

Since the onset of the current world economic crisis, whose effects continue to reverberate, the Group of Twenty has taken a premier role in world economic governance.  The group, which represents the major part of world economic flows, has been negotiating on a multistructural set of rules and recommendations in order to devise a new regime for the world economy. In light of this, the paper asks two critical questions: what are the values and norms of this new regime-in-the-making, particularly as they are manifest in new financial regulation, and how are these supranational norms to be put into (national) practices? The paper presents a brief history of regime-making in the period 2008 to 2014, and examines several soft-law models of supranational norm-creation in order to assess success in its implementation. The paper concludes that the G20 regime-in-the-making could prove successful in devising supranational economic policy for the present interconnected world economy if it takes the governance achievements of other such regimes into the account and if the members’ but also non-members’ national economic differences are taken into account to a greater extent. Otherwise, this new structure of norms might become another instrument for the sole benefit of industrialized countries.

Current financial crisis has seen numerous intergovernmental organisations’ declarations and plans to handle international finance in order to create conditions for strong, sustainable and balanced growth, with G20 leading this way. The crisis spill-over has clearly demonstrated a rising level of interdependence in the world economy. In spite of that, a unilateral state-level approach has so far been firmly in place and primarily national packages were implemented to minimise the adverse crisis effects to the real (national/regional) economies. This paper aims at evaluating the progress in creating a global regulatory scheme since the 2008 G20 Washington Summit, through reviewing shifts in political responses and changing agendas. The financial crisis of 2008 might have been a direct motive to start a global political interplay regarding regulation, but it was also a unique opportunity for numerous actors to start pressing their own agenda vis-à-vis a global economic (and political) order. Even though G20 efforts to coordinate policies and agree on regulatory common denominators have to be welcomed, the present level of discrepancy among national/regional agendas is still too significant for longer term and sustainable effects on the world economy to be foreseen. Nevertheless, the group’s unique position and the evolution of its agenda may point to a new form of informal minilateralism emerging in international relations.

Classical paradigms characterize left-oriented governments as being more interventionist in the economy than right-oriented ones. Nevertheless, many factors have influenced economic policy changes in modern parties. The paper first gives a literary review of parties’ orientation towards intervention in the economy. Secondly, a comparative analysis of economic policies is done for selected developed economies, combining the governments’ left-right composition with trends in their economic freedom. Finally, the paper summarizes main similarities and differences between left and right governments as to economic interventionism. The aim of the paper is to show how different economic policies with regard to market restrictiveness should change traditional perceptions of ideological inclination to economic interventionism. Our findings underscore the need for building a new ‘economic ideology’ map, as complement to traditional party classifications.