Securing the Global Economy

This book explores how and why the G8 and other institutions of global governance deal with increasingly comprehensive and complex economic-security connections. These connections are explored from an interdisciplinary perspective, with economists, political scientists and those in the policy world bringing their insights to bear. Moreover, this volume explores this economic-security connection from a constitutional or institutional perspective. In a classical liberal spirit, it is concerned with the organizing principles of a liberal international economic order and the framework of rules that enables it to survive and flourish. Security issues, national trade policies, the multilateral trade system and the detailed technical issues they subsume are analysed from this higher vantage point. This is thus a work about global governance as a whole and at its core, rather than a problem-solving manual for a few of the issues now at centre stage. Furthermore, it applies this larger vision to the current G8 and global economic-security agenda to generate a set of policy recommendations about how the global community, through and outside the G8, can better cope with the complex interconnected challenges it now confronts. Its innovative policy recommendations are especially timely when the recent global financial crisis, economic recession and fragile recovery place great strains on the liberal economic order, while new challenges from Iran, ongoing terrorist threats and corruption make this security-economic connection critically important.