At the 9th Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Bali it was agreed to develop a work program to conclude the long-running Doha round. This report argues that any work program should recognize that goods and services are increasingly produced in international supply chains. Many of the policies...

The deadlock in the WTO Doha Round has been accompanied by an increased focus on the negotiation of preferential trade agreements, including so-called ‘mega-regionals'. This paper discusses possible implications for — and possible responses by — excluded countries that have little...

The Agreement on Trade Facilitation (TFA) embodies the first set of new multilateral rules to have been negotiated under auspices of the WTO since the launch of the Doha Development Agenda, part of a small package of decisions centering on matters of interest to developing countries that was...

Can a WTO Member discriminate against foreign suppliers of services located in jurisdictions that refuse to share information with a government to permit it to determine if its nationals engage in tax evasion? Does it matter if the Member uses standards developed by an international body as the...

International law, political science and economics scholars are all concerned with analyzing the performance of the WTO as an organization. In this paper we focus on the objectives that these different disciplines attribute to the WTO and how performance is assessed against these objectives. The...

Governments increasingly are seeking to use bilateral and regional trade agreements to reduce the cost-increasing effects of differences in product market regulation. They also pursue regulatory cooperation independent of trade agreements. It is important to understand what is being done through...

In December 2019 the WTO Appellate Body (AB) will cease to operate unless the United States stops blocking new appointments. The US argues the AB has exceeded its mandate and has indicated it wants to ensure that the AB performs the role originally assigned to it in 1995. This paper discusses...

Recent debates on the operation of the WTO’s dispute resolution mechanism have focused primarily on the Appellate Body (AB). We argue that this neglects the first-order issue confronting the rules-based trading system: sustaining the principle of de-politicized conflict resolution that is...