Building a global economic regime through soft law

Abstract

This paper analyses a new, world-wide political debate on the issues of global economic coordination and regulation, exemplified by the Group of Twenty (G20). Major contending issues include the institutional aspect, i.e. who should regulate the global economy, the structural aspect, i.e. how this global regulation should be structured and organized, and the implementational aspect, that is how should globally-agreed principles and norms be implemented within national boundaries of hard law. In the Westphalian world of today, from the legal and political aspects, soft law system may open opportunities for coordinated policies to be successfully implemented on the national level. The paper firstly makes an overview of the global governance concept, analyzes the G20 agenda and presents the soft-law approach as probably the only feasible possibility to commence the process of creating a global economic policy / regulation.