ABSTRACT
There has been a variety of Third World approaches to international economic governance in the last century or so. This chapter traces three broad approaches. While there are common themes among them, each roughly represents a period during which it was or is ascendant. However, elements of each can be found within the three periods. All three approaches represent traditional Third World concerns on international economic governance. The three approaches traced here are the National Economic Control (NEC) approach, the New International Economic Order (NIEO) approach and finally the Regime Bias approach adopted by scholars of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) network. The NEC approach ascendant in the nineteenth century asserts national
economic sovereignty and rejects external economic controls. By asserting national economic control, Third World countries asserted their right to exercise control over foreign investors under their own laws so that foreign investors had no more rights than local investors. Under the NIEO approach, Third World countries proceed from the premise that the market does not always allocate resources towards fulfilling their most important needs such as addressing poverty. Third World countries therefore argue in favour of enacting interventions to address the blind spots and narrow focus of market governance on issues such as efficiency to the exclusion of values such as distributive equity and fairness. Levelling the playing field for Third World countries within the free market model of international economic governance is a crucial goal under this approach. Finally, the Regime Bias approach illustrates how the rules of the international trading regime disempower some of the most vulnerable members of the international economic order inconsistently with its liberal promise of even-handedness. It does so by examining the choices made between alternative meanings ascribed to a particular rule in its application by an administrative agency or at the adjudication stage by a domestic judicial body or an international tribunal. One of its primary strengths is in showing that legal rules are often as capable of being construed favourably or unfavourably towards vulnerable economies. Each of these three approaches is discussed in turn, before some concluding
remarks on the relationships between them are made in the conclusion to the chapter.
