Chapter 12 shows that the Covid-19 emergency and the ensuing suspension of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and its sanctioning mechanisms in 2020 led to crucial changes in the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime. For example, the transnational distribution of EU funds, institutionalised by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) Regulation in 2021, meant that the post-Covid NEG regime no longer mimicked the divisive beggar-thy-neighbour tools that transnational corporations use to steer their subsidiaries and workforce. Even so, EU executives continue to direct the post-Covid NEG regime without much participation by national parliaments and the European parliament or unions and social movements. Instead of using the financial sanctions of the suspended SGP, EU executives use the policy conditionalities attached to RRF funding to reach their objectives, which are in keeping with the overarching commodification script.

Chapter 11 compares the policy orientation of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions in two policy areas (employment relations, public services), three sectors (transport, water, healthcare), four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania) from 2009 to 2019. It reveals that almost all qualitative prescriptions pointed in a commodifying direction. Most quantitative prescriptions tasked governments to curtail wages and public expenditures too, but, over time, they not only became less coercive but also increasingly pointed in a decommodifying direction, tasking governments to invest more. It would, however, still be wrong to speak of a socialisation of NEG, not just given the decommodifying prescriptions’ weak coercive power but also because of their links to policy rationales that are compatible with NEG’s overarching commodification script. Moreover, Chapter 11 shows that NEG prescriptions tasked governments to channel more public resources into the allegedly more productive sectors (transport and water services) rather than into essential social services like healthcare. Given NEG’s country-specific methodology, it is not surprising that there have been only few instances of transnational action on specific NEG prescriptions. By contrast, the share of transnational labour protests targeting EU interventions broadly defined increased after 2008. This suggests that NEG has been altering protest landscapes.

This chapter describes why the World Trade Organization (WTO) has proven such a great challenge for the representation of women and women’s interests. Some progress has been made since the Aid-for-Trade programme, which cooperates with the WTO, incorporated gender mainstreaming in 2011. This includes the adoption of the 2017 Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment and the inauguration of the WTO Gender Research Hub in 2021. Nevertheless, to date the WTO has lagged behind other international organizations, including organizations of global economic governance, in representing women and their interests. The chapter posits the following reasons in historical context: (i) Women did not ‘get in on the ground floor’ at the WTO; (ii) The locus of power at the WTO rests with the members (exemplified by the requirement for consensus and the ’single undertaking’, the importance of member proposals, and the institutional weakness of the Secretariat); (iii) The relative lateness and weakness of WTO involvement with civil society, compared to other institutions of global economic governance; (iv) The formative clashes during the 1980s and 1990s between gender and trade activism and trade liberalization; (v) The lex specialis nature of the WTO dispute settlement system; (vi) The WTO is primarily a ‘hard-law’ institution.

Paths to a liberal order are not limited to those followed by Western countries. A possible Middle Eastern starting point was zakat, Islam’s only “pillar” with an explicitly economic function. Zakat appears in the Quran as a system that finances designated state expenses through a tax on wealth and income. The rates were low by the standards of Antiquity, and they were fixed. Besides, the payment of zakat legitimated the underlying wealth or income. Hence, it could have served as the foundation for political checks and balances based on secure private ownership. Yet zakat’s specifics were suited specifically to Arabia; it left out major sources of income and wealth in the broader Middle East. For these reasons alone, rulers imposed extra-Islamic taxes. Having set precedents for arbitrary taxation, they then essentially stopped enforcing zakat. A Quran-based Islamic institution for empowering the individual against the state thus turned into a minor device for local poor relief. The waqf’s emergence in the 700s as a core Islamic institution was a creative response to zakat’s abandonment as a state-enforced transfer system. Its unintended effects, such as the persistent weakness of civil society, are rooted, then, in zakat’s loss of relevance to Islamic governance.

Part II assesses the new economic governance of the Eurozone in light of the “rule of law” framework. Chapter 3 appraises this framework in light of the principle of conferral and the competence allocation system set up by the Treaties. It finds that the Treaties are marked by deep conceptual ambiguity as to the reach of the notion of economic policy and as to the meaning of the concept of policy coordination. It shows how this ambiguity, in-built flexibility and dynamism was fully taken advantage of by the Union in the context of the Eurocrisis and COVID-19 crisis to substantially transform and upgrade EU economic governance. It finds that the reform process flirted with the limits of what was constitutionally feasible but never facially violated the scope of the Treaties’ enabling clauses for economic policy. The advent of a new system of EU economic governance in the postcrisis era is not irreconcilable with the competence allocation system of the Union but materializes the Treaties’ spirit of purposive openness and contextual adaptability. As the EU legislator seems to have reached, with NGEU, the outer edge of what is constitutionally feasible, any further consolidation of the economic pillar would require Treaty revision.

The Conclusion summarizes the main findings and recommendations of the book. It offers closing remarks and reflects upon the role of law and the rule of law in the context of economic governance.

Chapter 2 makes sense of the many reforms passed in the field of economic and fiscal policy over the past decade by conceptualizing them from a governance perspective. Its focus is on the institutional dynamics under the economic pillar and integration techniques mobilized by policy actors. It recalls the centrality of "policy coordination" and finds that in the precrisis era economic coordination was rather loose, horizontal and state-centered, primarily geared towards the pursuit of collective policy goals. It then shows that the Eurocrisis and the COVID-19 crisis have brought the EU and its Member States to largely transcend and reshape this precrisis coordination pattern, leading to its evolution towards a new form of coordination and type of EU intervention in the field of economic policy. This pattern presents the following features. It is more centralized and vertical; no longer confines the Union to a processual role but enables it to meaningfully weigh in on the substance of the policies being coordinated; and is increasingly harmonizing, moving away from the experimentalist philosophy, as it primarily aims at ordering national policies in the economic and social field along the lines of a uniform model.

In order to extract economic criteria for European fiscal federalism, Chapter 3 examines public accounts statistics and the economic literature on EMU from 1992 through the European sovereign debt crisis. It follows a chain of macroeconomic indicators running from nominal interest-rate convergence to the sovereign debt crisis. It examines nominal interest-rate convergence; structural determinants of sovereign bond yields; real interest rates; private-sector domestic credit; cross-border credit flows; consolidated banking claims; current-account imbalances; real effective exchange-rates; public and private-sector debt; the sovereign-bank feedback loop; and fiscal policy. The analysis finds that the Euro Crisis was a private debt crisis, not a public one. The causa sine qua non of the crisis is a severe mispricing of private and public debt caused by a failure of Articles 121-126 TFEU to induce markets to differentiate between sovereign borrowers under a (now realised) bailout expectation – not sovereign debt.

This Chapter provides a general definition of sovereign debt, and illustrates the trend, dating back to the 1970s, of rising global public indebtedness, including in advanced economies, to reflect on the actual role of debt in the current global economic system. It then analyses the main elements of the post-crisis reform of the legal framework for economic and fiscal policy making in the European Economic and Monetary Union (a reform linked, inter alia, to the intensified need to subject the fiscal conduct of increasingly indebted states to stricter controls), and discusses how these seem to evidence the increased neoliberalisation of EU economic governance.