The global trading system underwent two major developments as the 20th century drew to a close. The first was the agreement between the United States and China in mid-November that will enable the Chinese to join the World Trade Organization in the near future. The second was the WTO's failure...

The eighth annual APEC leaders' meeting in Brunei in November 2000 may have marked a turning point in the life of the organization. It clearly set the stage for major progress at the October 2001 summit in Shanghai during the year of Chinese chairmanship of the APEC.

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which set out to achieve "free and open trade and investment in the region" and led highly significant liberalization initiatives in the 1990s, has been stagnating for the past decade. The main cause of APEC's marginalization was clearly the...

The "Asian economic crisis" is much deeper, much more pervasive and likely to last much longer than anyone imagined. Economies that had grown 6-8 percent annually for two decades are declining by like or greater amounts, a swing of depression-era magnitude with incalculable political and social...

China was the world's largest economy throughout most of recorded history and as recently as the late nineteenth century. The World Bank estimates that, on the basis of national purchasing power, China has already passed Germany to become the third-largest economy on the globe. It could move...

Japan proposed an "Asian Monetary Fund" during the early stages of the crisis more than a year ago. The idea was never specified sufficiently to permit objective evaluation. It was nevertheless immediately rejected, mainly by other Asians (most vocally China) but also by the United States and...

At their initial summit in Seattle in 1993, the APEC leaders decided to create "a community of Asia Pacific economies" and spurred the successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round in the GATT. In Indonesia in 1994, the leaders agreed via their Bogor Declaration "to achieve free and open trade and...

"Open regionalism" represents an effort to resolve one of the central problems of contemporary trade policy: how to achieve compatibility between the explosion of regional trading arrangements around the world and the global trading system as embodied in the World Trade Organization. The concept...

Five major lessons for successful global trade management emerge from the first fifty years of the GATT/WTO system. They need to be applied to the present situation to set the stage for another half century of successful multilateral trade cooperation. I will summarize the key headings at the...

The succession of severe financial and exchange rate crises in recent years has given a new sense of urgency to the debate on the "international financial architecture." Given the severity of these events, it is hard to justify the claim made by some that what is really at issue is a coincidence...