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Defining Accountability Up: the Global Economic Multilaterals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Miles Kahler
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Abstract

Critics of the global economic multilaterals (GEMs) – the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization – allege that these organizations fail the test of democratic accountability. Two distinct measures of democratic accountability have been applied to the GEMs. To the degree that these organizations display ‘accountability deficits’, those deficiencies are the result of choices by the most influential national governments. Three techniques have been deployed to enhance the accountability of the GEMs: transparency (more information for those outside the institution), competition (imitation of democratic accountability) and changes in rules of representation (accountability to stakeholders rather than shareholders). Each of these may impose costs, however, and may conflict with other valued aims of the organizations.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , 2004 , pp. 132 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2004

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References

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23 McGillivray, Democratizing the World Trade Organization, op. cit.

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28 Current IMF transparency policy is described in International Monetary Fund, ‘The Fund's Transparency Policy – Review of the Experience and Next Steps’, Washington, DC, 24 May 2002.

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30 Information on the IEO can be found at .

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32 (29 April 2001).

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34 This account is based on Kahler, Leadership Selection, op. cit.

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37 Loy, ‘Public Participation in the World Trade Organization’, op. cit., p. 116. The designers of the ITO may have had in mind the quasi-corporatist model of the International Labour Organization (ILO), founded immediately after the First World War.

38 Ibid., p. 128.

39 Wolf, ‘What the World Needs’, op. cit., p. 199.

40 Ibid., pp. 197–8; O’Brien et al., Contesting Global Governance, op. cit., pp. 200–1.

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43 Loy, ‘Public Participation in the World Trade Organization’, op. cit., p. 124.

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