Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the challenges of integrating an economically powerful State in the international economic order. It draws upon the US Special 301 Reports between 2018 to 2020. The book focuses on the way the US identifies the exchange rate and macroeconomic policies of its key trading partners, including the policy advice it gives to them. It concentrates on the US apparatus that is set in two different pieces of legislation concerned essentially with currency manipulation—from the perspective of the WTO and IMF legal regimes. The chapter concludes that the US regime concerning currency manipulation, although implemented to address a compliance void under the IMF and WTO procedures, is despite that justification, flawed. It concentrates on ECRA from an international law perspective.