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...

Although the WTO has fulfilled several key tasks it was set up to do – providing periodic reviews of members’ trade policies, resolving disputes, supporting negotiations – with the notable exceptions of the Trade Facilitation and Information Technology agreements, WTO members have not been...

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...