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...

1999 is likely to be a watershed year for the world trading system. The Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November/December hopes to chart a course for global trade policy in the early part of the twenty-first century. The European Union, Japan, the United...

A large part of the world has eliminated all barriers to trade or is in the process of doing so. The fifteen members of the European Union have created a "single internal market." Australia and New Zealand have completed their free trade area. Several large groupings are en route to a similar...

The initial postwar challenge from East Asia was economic. Japan crashed back into global markets in the 1960s, became the largest surplus and creditor country in the 1980s, and was viewed by many as the world’s dominant economy by 1990. The newly industrialized countries (Korea, Taiwan, Hong...