While to an economist, business person or policy maker, movement of goods, services and foreign direct investment should logically be covered in the same agreement, history has not allowed this to happen. International legal regimes are spinning into greater fragmentation as the number of...

In federal states, such as Canada, the negotiation and implementation of international economic and trade agreements require delicate collaboration between federal and sub-national levels of government. This article examines the legal complexities of the Canadian Constitution with respect to the...

The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 was a historic achievement. It provided a means for implementing the Uruguay Round agreements, while providing for continuity with the previous GATT system, and also formally established, for the first time in history, an...

There is not one, perfect model for institutional regulatory cooperation, nor is there a single model for eliminating technical barriers to trade or discriminatory sanitary and phytosanitary measures in a preferential trade agreement (PTA). However, recent experience with PTAs has shown that it...

The dispute settlement system of the WTO was faced with major challenges in its first few years. It has functioned very well in spite of serious pressures from the sheer number of cases that were brought; the increasing complexity and economic significance of disputes; the strict,short...

Developing and administering disciplines on the use of subsidies is one of the most difficult areas of international economic policy and rule making. It is also one of the most pervasive problems in international trade. Subsidization has taken on new prominence in the economic policy toolkit as...

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an anomaly among international organizations in the world today. It is one of the newest of all the international organizations, born less than twenty years ago, yet it has a pedigree going back to the end of World War II. Why has the WTO been viewed with...

There is a great deal of misunderstanding and confusion about what the World Trade Organization (WTO) is, what it does, and how it works. The misconceptions, myths and fallacies about the WTO are numerous, but the author focuses on a few key questions central to the legitimacy of the WTO. Who...

The first Director of the WTO Appellate Body Secretariat responds to Joost Pauwelyn's book and articles on the relationship between WTO law and other international law. She asks: what status does non-WTO law, including customary international law, general international law and other treaties,...

The former Director of the WTO Appellate Body Secretariat reviews Claude Barfield's book, Free Trade, Sovereignty, Democracy: The Future of the World Trade Organization, which aroused great interest around the world when it was published. Until this book, the WTO dispute settlement system was...