From the Introduction. Since the inception of the Bretton Woods system in 1945, major fields of global
economic governance have been essentially associated with a single international
organisation or arrangement. Trade was governed by the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and later the World Trade Organisation (WTO), whereas the
International Monetary Fund has been a key point of reference in finance and
monetary issues and the World Bank1
played a similar role in development policy. A
common characteristic of these institutions is that they were set up in the wake of
World War II, and the distribution of influence among their members was, for the
most part, reflective of mid-twentieth-century balance-of-power considerations.
While these long-term institutional arrangements remain cemented, world affairs
constantly change, raising the risk of a glaring mismatch between the way in which
power is shared in these international institutions and the realities of global politics
