Finance

This study is an initiative of the ISPI’s Centre on Infrastructure, promoted with the knowledge partnership of McKinsey & Company. It analyses the importance of economic infrastructure and how to finance and develop it. Economic infrastructure is the backbone that, in many cases, crosses the borders of political geo- graphy and defines the space supporting the movement of goods, services, people and their ideas.

What’s going on in the European arena? Regulators, trading venues, market participants, financial and commodity analysts and data reporting agencies are all debating on the legal and operational implications of the various recent financial and energy regulations in the EU, whose implementations are already in effect either fully or partly. The three burdensome regulations flapping commodity firms are REMIT (Regulation on Energy Market Integrity and Transparency), EMIR (European Market Infrastructure Regulation), and MiFID II (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive ).

The G20 forum is a relatively new addition to the global governance architecture. The group has no secretariat or treaty, and instead relies on consensus agreement of its membership of 19 of the world’s largest developed and emerging economies and the European Union. G20 countries ‘sign up’ to commitments voluntarily with some peer review processes. When the G20 cooperates and countries implement policy in tandem, the forum can act as the ‘steering committee’ for the global economy.