Abstract
ABSTRACT In 2011, the OECD turned fifty. To provide a broad foundation for further thinking on this organization, we analyse its evolution over half a century from two perspectives: phases in the international political economy and the literature on IPE. By so doing, we uncover two paradoxes. Firstly, we find that the organization's evolution closely mirrored major phases in the post-war international political economy until recently. However, the OECD's long-term dependence on the West has now become an obstacle to its efforts to adapt to the latest phase, characterised by the rise of non-Western powers. Secondly, we show that, during the OECD's “golden age”, scholars paid relatively little attention to the organization but, from the 2000s, as the organization faced an unprecedented challenge of its potential economic decline, IPE literature on the organization blossomed.
Highlights
Fifty years ago, in September 1961, the Convention establishing the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) came into force, effectively establishing a framework upon which would be built a long-lasting relationship between the world’s major economies of that time, an alliance dominated by the transatlantic nexus between the US and Western Europe
We argue that the OECD does matter to scholars of international political economy, and that neglecting this organization can skew our understanding of global economic governance
We argued here that there are at least three additional, and more important, reasons, which justify its study: the importance of international organizations in providing global public goods; ongoing organizational reform in the face of shifting wealth to the East and South; and the long-term lack of scholarship on the OECD
Summary
In September 1961, the Convention establishing the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) came into force, effectively establishing a framework upon which would be built a long-lasting relationship between the world’s major economies of that time, an alliance dominated by the transatlantic nexus between the US and Western Europe. Its historic dependence on the West is proving sticky, impeding reform, whilst limiting the organization’s capacity to respond to the needs of the rest of the world (Clifton and Díaz-Fuentes, 2011) These forward-looking questions help contextualize contemporary analysis of the OECD as it reaches its fiftieth anniversary. We derive the framework of the international political economy from the seminal contributions of the economist Angus Maddison who, as well as being a pre-eminent scholar on the evolution of the world economy, helped pioneer much of the national account data collection as an official in the OEEC and subsequently OECD Department of Economics and Statistics. We highlight the paradox that scholars paid very little attention to the OECD during its “golden” days, whilst scholarship blossomed from the 2000s, as the OECD entered the most serious of its organizational challenges to date
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