Until the 1980s, most national economies were characterized by a clear hierarchy of norms both within the legal order and between public and private ordering. Transnational exchange was then governed by inter-governmental agreements aimed at articulating these national economic systems and associated public and private norms. Since then, this governance regime has experienced massive changes. A great number of new norm-makers and intermediaries now shape the incentives and sanctions that govern economic behaviors, resulting in complexity, unpredictability, inconsistencies, and innovations.
The Handbook addresses this complexity, through expert analysis and case studies from a multidisciplinary team of economists, sociologists, political scientists, international political economy specialists and historians. The volume is organized around the logic of questioning how international systems of exchange work. In the first section, the authors explore the micro foundation of cross border exchange and transnational contracts by analyzing how private ordering, networks of agents, along with governments and officials build and regulate (imperfect) markets. The discussion then explores the challenges of compliance with those norms and regulations, highlighting how market discipline and judicial sanctions combine, and how a "rule of law" tends to develop at the international level. The next section studies the governmental initiatives to organize markets and fix market failures in a world characterized by political fragmentation and imbalance amongst governments, and also between states and non-governmental actors. Finally, there's consideration of new modes of law-making, new forms of adjudication and dispute settlement, new vectors of accountability and of guarantee of commitments that combine to initiate emerging models of governance, which co-exist with traditional ones.
