Abstract
The modern system of global governance consists of a number of regimes in different issue-areas: security, finance, trade, investment and many other areas of global competition and cooperation. Despite a seemingly inexhaustible variety of those regimes, all of them may be classified by a finite (and small) number of governance structures. In our research, we defined seven types of governance structures, top–down: from global hierarchical coordinating bodies with powerful enforcement tools to a free international market. International actors based their choice of governance structures on a countable number of factors. Academic researchers working within the framework of transaction cost economics, primarily at the micro-level, investigated these factors.
This chapter seeks to identify the set of factors that played an important role in the choice of current modes of global governance, to trace their recent changes and to elucidate the economic rationale for the apparent or forecasted evolution of those governance structures. We focus our investigation on several global governance regimes—for energy, the environment and trade. Although these areas are transforming as the economic environment shifts, they nevertheless display patterns common to the general evolution of governance structures.
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Notes
- 1.
Asset specificity—the degree to which an asset can be redeployed to alternative uses and by alternative users without sacrifice of productive value (Williamson 1991).
- 2.
It is still partially available under the umbrella of a much more sophisticated and updated database IEADB at https://iea.uoregon.edu/
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Kurdin, A. (2020). Empirical Investigation into Economic Fundamentals of Global Governance Structures. In: Grigoryev, L., Pabst, A. (eds) Global Governance in Transformation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23092-0_14
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