Public Private Partnership for WTO Dispute Settlement is an interdisciplinary work examining the growing interaction between business entities and public officials. Crucially, it identifies how this relationship can enable developing countries to effectively utilize the provisions of the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Understanding (WTO DSU).
This volume is a comprehensive account of developing countries and their positioning within the WTO legal system. It comprises chapters by a number of leading experts in the law and economics of international trade who reflect on Robert Hudec's groundbreaking 1987 book Developing Countries in the GATT Legal System, and offers political, economic, and legal perspectives on Hudec's legacy.
The World Trade Organization—backbone of today's international commercial relations—requires member countries to self-enforce exporters' access to foreign markets. Its dispute settlement system is the crown jewel of the international trading system, but its benefits still fall disproportionately to wealthy nations. Could the system be doing more on behalf of developing countries? In Self-Enforcing Trade, Chad P. Bown explains why the answer is an emphatic "yes." Bown argues that as poor countries look to the benefits promised by globalization as part of their overall development strategy, they increasingly require access to the WTO dispute settlement process to protect their trading interests. Unfortunately, the practical realities of WTO dispute settlement as it currently stands create a number of hurdles that prevent developing countries from enjoying the trading system's full benefits. This book confronts these challenges. Self-Enforcing Trade examines the WTO's "extended litigation process," highlighting the tangle of international economics, law, and politics that participants must master. He identifies the costs that prevent developing countries from disentangling the self-enforcement process and fully using the WTO system as part of their growth strategies. Bown assesses recent efforts to help developing countries overcome those costs, including the role of the Advisory Centre on WTO Law and development focused NGOs. Bown's proposed Institute for Assessing WTO Commitments tackles the largest remaining obstacle currently limiting developing country engagement in the WTO's selfenforcement process—a problematic lack of information, monitoring, and surveillance.
This book analyzes the much-needed and vastly under-studied subject of bargaining coalitions of developing countries in the GATT and WTO. This is an extremely important contribution to the field.
The History and Future of the World Trade Organization is a comprehensive account of the economic, political and legal issues surrounding the creation of the WTO and its evolution. Fully illustrated with colour and black-and-white photos dating back to the early days of trade negotiations, the publication reviews the WTO's achievements as well as the challenges faced by the organisation, and identifies the key questions that WTO members need to address in the future. The book describes the intellectual roots of the trading system, membership of the WTO and the growth of the Geneva trade community, trade negotiations and the development of coalitions among the membership, and the WTO's relations with other international organisations and civil society. Also covered are the organisation's robust dispute settlement rules, the launch and evolution of the Doha Round, the rise of regional trade agreements, and the leadership and management of the WTO.
Although it is common knowledge that the compliance of developing countries with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) has become a serious stumbling block in the WTO agenda, the underlying reasons why this is so have not been dispassionately analyzed until the appearance of this book. Here, for the first time, is a thorough and secure foundation on which international trade lawyers and business people can build a global intellectual property regime that is both productive and fair. The implementation of the TRIPS regime with its enormous effect on national and global strategies for healthcare, agriculture, and the environment, among other crucial sectors of the world economy is clearly among the most critical projects currently under way in the field of international relations. As a former TRIPS negotiator for India, Jayashree Watal brings great authority to her account of the benefits and pitfalls of TRIPS compliance for developing countries. She provides a detailed understanding of how TRIPS was negotiated at the Uruguay Round, how various countries have implemented it so far, and how the WTO monitors compliance. She reveals how the WTO dispute settlement process has worked to date in matters involving TRIPS, and how it is likely to deal with new issues that arise. Most importantly, she explains how developing countries can interpret TRIPS to their best advantage, and how to ensure that the `constructive ambiguity' that characterizes the agreement remains flexible.
This book examines the public stockholding policies of selected developing countries from the perspective of WTO rules and assesses whether the provisions of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) could hamper these countries’ efforts to address the challenges of food security. Further, it highlights the need to amend the provisions of the AoA to make WTO rules just and fair for the millions of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. This book highlights that 12 countries namely China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Zambia and Zimbabwe are facing or will face problems in implementing the food security policies due to the provisions under AoA. These provisions need to be amended for permitting developing countries to address hunger and undernourishment. Progress in WTO negotiations on public stockholding for food security purposes are also discussed and analysed. The findings of this study greatly benefit trade negotiators, policymakers, civil society, farmers groups, researchers, students and academics interested in issues related to the WTO, agriculture and food security.
This is a comprehensive overview of the law and practice of the World Trade Organization. It begins with the institutional law of the WTO, moving eventually to the consequences of globalization. New chapters on Trade in Agriculture and on Government Procurement and Trade.
