G20 and the World Economic Policy: Agenda Development

Miroslava Filipović

Sažetak

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.

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