ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how governments use international institutions in economic diplomacy. It elaborates on one of the principal strategies in the new economic diplomacy. The chapter discusses what governments do, as members of international institutions, and how they try to make the institutions serve their national purposes, domestic as well as external. It begins with a general analysis of how governments approach the institutions: what governments want from international economic institutions; and how they get what they want, in conditions of advancing globalisation. The chapter contains separate assessments of plurilateral institutions, focusing on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Group of seven/Group of eight and the Commonwealth, and of multilateral ones, concentrating on the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and the environmental work of the United Nations. It sets out a method of classifying international institutions in their light of the contribution to economic diplomacy.
