Decision making in the WTO has become ever more difficult as the number of members increases and the range of issues tackled broadens. This paper looks at reasons why aspects of decision-making might be changed and discusses a number of potential pitfalls that change would have to avoid, such as...

Until recently, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been an effective framework for cooperation because it has continually adapted to changing economic realities. The current Doha Agenda is an aberration because it does not reflect one of the biggest shifts in the international economic and...

This paper argues that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are not substitutes, and while PTAs are without doubt here to stay, dispensing with a multilateral venue for doing business in trade matters is not a serious option. It is therefore necessary to...

In a rapidly changing trade environment, marked by economic slowdown and impasse in the Doha Round, the success of the WTO in promoting and legitimizing the rules-based multilateral trading system rests, to a large extent, on maintaining effective relations with civil society, including...

The original ‘building blocks or stumbling blocks’ debate considered the positive and negative impacts on the multilateral trading system in the form of the World Trade Organization (WTO) of free trade agreements (FTAs) at a time when FTAs were primarily bilateral and/or regional. This...

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is in need of reform, including new rules. While there is not yet a comprehensive reform agenda for the WTO, developing e-commerce rules should be seen as part of WTO reform in two respects. First, the development of such rules will allow the WTO to demonstrate...

Do WTO commitments reduce the risk of trade policy reversals? To address this question, we rely on the theoretical model of varying cooperative tariffs by Bagwell and Staiger (1990) to specify our empirical model for the probability of a tariff increase. We then study how WTO tariff commitments...

The international economic crisis which began in 2007 has limited developed countries' growth rates and manifested debt crises in certain economies in the Eurozone. It is the aim of this article to analyze the role that the BRIC group of nations has played in international financial institutions...

To date, government procurement has been effectively carved out of the main multilateral rules of the WTO system. This paper examines the systemic and other ramifications of this exclusion, from both an economic and a legal point of view. In addition to relevant elements of the WTO Agreements,...

The Article proposes new interpretations of GATT Article XX to minimize the harmful effects of recent WTO jurisprudence that threaten to undermine the goals of the trading system and diminish the role of states in policymaking. In the Shrimp/Turtle cases the WTO's Appellate Body (AB) utilized an...