One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and three years after the start of the food and commodities crisis, time seems ripe to make a provisional assessment of the resilience of the open trade policies to this severe downturn, and to draw the main lessons. In attempting to answer this...

In its latest Report on the “financial and economic crisis and trade-related developments” (26 March 2009), the WTO used the term “significant slippage” to qualify changes in protection observed from late 2008 to March 2009. Most of the newspapers in the world translated these terms into...

One of the stated objectives of recent ‘mega’ preferential trade agreements (PTAs) being negotiated by large trading powers is to address the trade-impeding effects of differences in national regulation. Past experience demonstrates there are serious limitations in what can be achieved in...

One of the stated objectives of recent ‘mega’ preferential trade agreements (PTAs) being negotiated by large trading powers is to address the trade-impeding effects of differences in national regulation. Past experience demonstrates there are serious limitations in what can be achieved in...

Under the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreement, only 19 WTO Members have made commitments in audiovisual services in their GATS schedule. As illustrated by Table 1, these commitments are generally of limited scope and magnitude [WTO, 1998]. Among the large audiovisual producers, only the United States...

Services providers are busy re-designing their strategies to cope with the global economic crisis. In order to take the right decisions, they need clarity and predictability on future market access in services. Meanwhile, consumers impoverished by the current crisis would greatly benefit from...

Tough times are expected in the year(s) to come, but focusing entirely on public and private budget cuts is not a politically sustainable policy. On top of its direct impoverishing impact, austerity has an indirect impact, which is very corrosive in the long run for consumers. It induces...