Why do institutions emerge, change, persist and die? This book examines the conditions under which states use available institutions, select among alternative institutional forums, change existing institutional rules, or create brand-new institutions. The authors reveal and explain the striking staying power of the institutional status quo – the existing institutions at the time a new cooperation challenge arises. Building on bounded rationality, their novel theoretical approach provides a distinctive way to think about institutional choice and sheds light on a wide range of institutional choices in global commerce, from the nineteenth century to the present. These include a range of cases, from the creation in 1876 of the first truly international system of commercial dispute resolution, the Mixed Courts of Egypt, to the creation of the GATT and the evolution of post-World War II global trade governance.
• Offers an original theory of institutional choice, addressing a central debate in social science • Offers an application to the history of global commerce • Both the theory and the empirical historical material are presented in an accessible way, to appeal to students as well as specialists
Contents
Part I: 1. Introduction: institutional choice in global commerce; 2. International institutional choice: cooperation, alternatives and strategies; 3. Building Theseus' ship: why the ITO failed, the GATT succeeded and the WTO emerged; Part II: 4. Creating the first international court of commercial dispute resolution: the mixed courts of Egypt; 5. Commercial complexity and institutional choice in the GATT era; 6. Institutional choice in global accounting governance; Part III: 7. Conclusion: overview and institutional theories compared.
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