There was a time when international legal scholars focusing on the law governing the global economy tended to stay within their areas of specialization. Those focusing on international trade looked mainly to the WTO agreements and decisions of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body without considering the interaction within international investment law or international financial law. International investment lawyers first concentrated on diplomatic protection, and then on Bilateral Investment Treaties and investor–State arbitration. International financial lawyers wrote about the International Monetary Fund, international loans, sovereign debt, the Basel Accords, and more recently the so-called soft law on global finance and banking.

This book argues that this state of affairs has to change. International economic lawyers, both practitioner and academic, need to consider its practical operation in and between States, and explore the connections between trade, investment and finance. Scholarship therefore needs not only to ‘drill down’ into particular doctrinal categories but also to engage across those categories.

The book is themed around the notion that, in the wake of the so-called Great Recession, there is now a transition towards a more substantive and contextual international economic law. It therefore seeks to set the stage for a post-Great Recession form of international economic law. It also evaluates international economic law in the wake of the European debt crisis. Its primary aim is to grapple with what international lawyers know as fragmentation, arguing that international economic law has to deal with fragmentation as a matter or priority if it is going to make sense of how the global economy is and should be governed.

The book is based on a collection of papers delivered at the second conference of the Asian International Economic Law Network (AIELN), held at the University of Hong Kong in 2011.

The Introduction is a substantive and important chapter. It provides an excellent presentation and analysis of fragmentation of international economic law both before and after the Great Recession. It is very well written and could well serve as essential reading for an introductory student course on international economic law. Looked at in historical perspective, it concludes that the Great Recession is not ‘one of the defining moments of the discipline’, whilst stressing that fragmentation ‘remains a persistent feature’ of international economic law.

The focus on fragmentation informs the structure of the book. Part I deals with monetary cooperation, trade and finance, Part II with trade and linkages, Part III with investment law and intellectual property protection, and Part IV with aspects of climate change regulation.

Part II starts with Chapter 2 on the soft law character of global financial law, a significant issue deserving ongoing attention. It focuses on the fragmented nature of norms in international economic law, this being a mixture of hard and soft law with the latter enjoying high levels of compliance. However, it points out that there are other values at stake which favour more hard-law approaches, including transparency and stability in the global financial system. Chapter 3 looks at the regulation of credit rating agencies, whose activities and regulatory failure are widely understood to have contributed to the global financial crisis. It examines the EU Regulation on credit rating agencies and its extraterritorial effects. There are no international law frameworks regulating credit rating agencies; rather, States rely on harmonization and regulatory cooperation.

Chapter 4 deals with EU financial sector integration before and after the Eurozone debt crisis of 2010. It provides an overview of the pre-crisis development of an EU single market for financial services, the evolution of that market and the causes of the Eurozone crisis. Chapter 4 also reviews the principal aspects of the European banking union and evaluates how new institutions will affect EU economic and political integration. It concludes with a discussion of implications of the EU's experience for the future of financial integration. Chapter 5 turns to a political economic analysis of the significance of East Asia and its lack of participation in global financial regulation. The chapter explores how this imbalance could affect the long-term development of regulatory infrastructure and the need to deal with the role of China and the so-called Beijing consensus.

The final chapter in Part I explores China's currency devaluations, and in particular the argument that China has manipulated its currency to boost exports. This chapter, authored by one of the co-editors, shows how it is possible to develop a moralized conception of international law, foreshadowing in some ways Dworkin's ‘A New Philosophy for International Law’. Lim explains that ‘[i]nternational economic lawyers have … tended to focus … on what the rules say’, meaning that China and its trading partners may be able to take unilateral action and not violate the rules. But he argues against unilateral ‘free-for-alls’ arguing that the gaps produced by fragmented legal regimes have to be filled using moral judgment, combined with positive law: ‘In this sense, the debate is as old as that between the natural lawyers who would not confine all that we would call ‘‘law’’ to that which may be traced to the voluntary consent of sovereigns to international rules, and so-called legal positivists, who would.’

Part II concerns fragmentation in world trade law. As the Introduction explains, given the proliferation of ‘trade and’ issues and the substantial interaction of many trade norms with domestic regulatory law, trade law rules are highly fragmented. The first chapter in this part, Chapter 7, argues that disparities in areas of sovereign discretion, when considered along with areas where there is little sovereign control, block global cooperation in economics and finance. It considers the negative policy consequences which flow from interdependent economic activity being regulated by States independently. Chapter 8 explores fragmentation between trade law and development law. It examines the development of Chinese industrial policy and uses this as a means of exploring the policy space that developing countries have. Chapter 9 explores challenges and opportunities that fragmentation offers for pursuing non-trade goals within the trade regime. For example, liberalization under the GATS might affect internet censorship and lead to further human rights protections, though the authors are rightly sceptical about this. Chapter 10 deals with norm fragmentation in safeguard measures across regional, bilateral and WTO agreements and finds there to be no common approach. Chapter 11 examines fragmentation between the ASEAN Comprehensive Investment Agreement and the WTO agreements and evaluates whether ASEAN members can authorize suspensions of concessions in breach of WTO obligations.

Part III deals with intellectual property (IP) protection in international investment law but in fact goes beyond IP issues. Chapter 12 considers the substantial gaps which exist in the regulation of investment companies by the US and the EU, which may be the result of entrenched interests and practices. It also evaluates whether convergence is normatively desirable. Chapter 13 deals with two important questions concerning international investment agreements and the European sovereign debt crisis: whether public debt obligations are covered by international investment agreements and whether private bondholders can file arbitral claims under these agreements, looking at these questions in the context of the collective action clauses found in Greek legislation. The chapter offers a comprehensive review of 40 BITs to which Greece is a party and shows how the lack of an international legal regime for debt restructuring interacts with the international protection of foreign investments and investors. Chapter 14 surveys China's BITs, examining the approach of the Chinese government towards their negotiation and how the BITs that China has entered into operate in practice. It finds that foreign investors rarely rely on formal dispute resolution mechanisms in BITs with China. It also examines China's overseas investment activities and it looks at fragmentation between general customary international law and BITs provisions. The editors explain that Chapter 15 is one of the first pieces of research to examine the trend of both private and sovereign international investors to acquiring land in foreign jurisdictions in order to produce and export food back to the home country. They classify this as a soft form of fragmentation: as ‘under-regulation’ or ‘imperfect global economic regulation’. The chapter deals with questions concerning the future of global economic relations with regard to poverty, hunger, and climate change. Chapter 16 looks at IP protection in international investment agreements, dealing with the relationship between IP law, trade law, and investment law. Chapter 17 shows how the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement does not do what it is supposed to do by way of increasing and harmonizing the enforcement of IP rights. Rather, it further fragments international IP law by allowing parties to maintain the status quo.

Part IV deals with the relationships between climate change measures and international economic law. Chapter 18 examines the consistency between the WTO agreements and the EU scheme requiring airlines to acquire and ‘surrender’ allowances for carbon emissions produced by their flights. Under this policy, the EU is essentially seeking to export its emission trading system. Chapter 19 looks at whether the WTO agreements provide States with the policy space to take measures aimed at promoting renewable energy. The authors conclude that measures that distort or otherwise restrict trade will comply with the WTO agreements provided they are bona fide, applied impartially, and not unduly restrictive of trade.

This is an important edited collection, offering a set of original contributions that takes the analysis of fragmentation in international economic law seriously. Without such a focus, there is the risk that governments and international organizations will rely on unexamined assumptions about the international economic legal order and produce legal rules and policies for global governance which are either wrong or which are not very good. This book offers an important start in thinking deeply about fragmentation. Perhaps its most important contribution is methodological: it suggests that lawyers should identify the normative problems that fragmentation can sometimes produce and seek to address them in a way that mitigates the normative disorder that fragmentation sometimes produces. It fills an important gap in the literature.