| This dissertation does the following: First, it draws attention to the ascendancy of international organizations and increasing legalization as principal characteristics of economic globalization. Second, it focuses on two such institutions that are pivotal to this emergent global order, namely, the International Monetary Fund (the Fund) and the World Trade Organization (the WTO). And finally, it attempts to shed light on their regulatory convergence over trade and fiscal matters with particular reference to the likely implications for developing Members to the WTO. In sum, the overarching objective of the dissertation is to subject the coordinated regulatory supervision of the Fund and the WTO over subject areas in the trade and finance interface to scrutiny.; To animate, and to ground its analysis, the dissertation deploys the following research methodology: it combines a partly doctrinal and partly inter-disciplinary approach, in order to capture the nature and implications of this regulatory convergence by the Fund and the WTO. Specifically, the research methodology entails a thematic case study of the Fund and the WTO especially as it relates to their governance of interlocking subject areas. Thus, through a historical, institutional, and a representative review of WTO cases involving its developing Members, the dissertation attempts to highlight, not only the Fund's legal influence in the WTO, in addition, it develops a taxonomy of their combined governance of developing countries.; Using the data set it generates, the dissertation attempts to develop its working hypothesis of the regulatory convergence by the Fund and the WTO: that the Fund plays a pervasive, yet shielded legal role in the WTO; that the legalization of the international trade sphere through dispute settlement procedures arguably provides a veneer of adjudicative legitimacy to the actions of the Fund; that such legal influence of the Fund in the WTO threatens to undermine the relative institutional strengths enjoyed by developing Members in the WTO; And finally, that there is a need to deploy a counter-strategy that is anchored on a solid theoretical understanding of the emergent forms of global governance by those international institutions.; For developing Members to the WTO, the findings of the dissertation suggest: that the heightened resonance of the rhetoric: "coherence and coordination in international policy-making" between international institutions of governance may actually end up, further marginalizing them; that organizational requirements retaining the institutional distance between the Fund and the WTO better protects their relative strengths; and finally, that constructivism may be the most promising theoretical device to contain--or even take advantage of--the salience of this regulatory advance. |
