Regulating international finance and the diversity of capitalism

Abstract

In this paper, I put the ongoing G20 process of improving the regulation of international finance into a historically and theoretically informed perspective. To understand the driving forces behind and obstacles to international cooperation in governing finance I combine concepts from international and comparative political economy. Different variants of capitalism have reacted in distinct ways to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in the 1970s. Countries like the USA and the UK followed a path of financialization while Germany and countries in East Asia have pursued an export-oriented growth model. The interdependence between two variants of capitalism has contributed to the dynamics and crises of international finance for the past four decades. This ‘imbalance of capitalisms’ also became an obstacle to international cooperation in regulating finance, because both variants have different preferences for international cooperation in the fields of macroeconomic policies, currency policies, as well as the regulation of financial flows and financial firms.