The international trade regulatory system is a dynamic system that has been evolving throughout its history. Tension and conflict are part of the system. While calls for the abolition of the principal trade regulation authority, the WTO, have failed to understand this nature of the system,...

What incentives do governments have to negotiate "new trade agreements," i.e., agreements that constrain not only governments' choices of tariffs, but also their domestic regulatory policies? We focus on horizontal product standards, i.e., those that impose requirements along a horizontal...

This paper first briefly describes the role of the WTO and its history. It then lays out a simple bargaining model of international negotiations, which can be used for understanding the Doha Round of talks. Using this, we distil what we regard as the major potential explanations for the...

In the mid-1990s, the policy debate within the WTO focused on whether regional trade agreements (RTAs) were building blocks or stumbling blocks for the WTO system, essentially questioning whether regionalism was appropriate at all from an economic policy perspective. Given the proliferation of...