Emerging World Order? From Multipolarity to Multilateralism in the G20, the World Bank, and the IMF
By Robert H. Wade. 2011
204 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Many developing and transitional countries have grown faster than advanced countries in the past decade, resulting in a shift in the distribution of world income in their favor. China is now the second largest economy in the world, behind the United States and ahead of Japan. As the relative economic weight of China and several others has come to match or exceed that of the middle-ranking G7 economies, the world economy has shifted from “unipolar” toward “multipolar,” less dominated by the G7. How is this change being translated into changes in authority and influence within multilateral organizations like the G20, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? Alarm bells are ringing in G7 capitals about G7 loss of influence. According to a WikiLeaks cable from the senior U.S. official for the G20 process, from January 2010, “It is remarkable how closely coordinated the BASIC group of countries [Brazil, South Africa, India, China] have become in international fora, taking turns to impede US/EU initiatives and playing the US and EU off against each other.” This essay suggests that the shift in power is much smaller than the headlines or private alarm bells suggest. The United States remains the dominant state, and the G7 states together continue to exercise primacy, but now more fearfully and defensively. China is split between asserting itself as “the wave of the future” and defending itself as too poor to take on global responsibilities (it is roughly 100th in the per capita income hierarchy). The combination of G7 defensiveness and emerging states’ jealous guarding of sovereignty produces a spirit of Westphalian assertion in international fora, or “every state for itself.” On the assumption that the world economy is in a transitional period, the article suggests reforms in the G20 and the World Bank that would boost their role and legitimacy as multilateral organizations in a more multipolar world.
Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics, Finance
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b0f57a5489b47e0bcc72348b57fe9f680ab4ba4
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Development
In Economics and Econometrics
In Finance
Citations in the corpus
- Emerging powers, North–South relations and global climate politics (2012, unknown): “44 Finally, although this article has stressed the differences within the South, the clearly increased differentiation that has resulted from the rise of emerging powers, and the limits to the ‘power’ of emerging powers, we should be cautious before condemning South–South collaboration to the…”
- Rising powers, global capitalism and liberal global governance: A historical materialist account of the BRICs challenge (2014, background): “…order that has sought to remove barriers to crossborder trade in goods and services, facilitate transnational movements of capital and currencies, and propagate an ideology of the individual that sustains a global discourse of human rights (Cox, 1987; Gill, 2003; Ikenberry, 2011b; wade, 2011).”
- Return of industrial policy? (2012, unknown): “The development caravan is lengthening (Wade 2011a).”
- Reflections on a Decade of Global Rankings: What We've Learned and Outstanding Issues (2014, background): “True, rankings are not been the only factor driving a resource-intensive investment race; but they do chronicle these wider changes in the world polity, such as the Group of Seven (G7) being overshadowed by the G20, and shifts in world income in favour of China, now the world’s second largest econom”