The Political Economy Of The World Trading System

New to this edition.

The creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 ushered in a new era in world trading arrangements. Building on the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT), the intergovernmental treaty that for 50 years had regulated international trade relations, the WTO is a global organization of equal standing to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and will set the agenda for international trade for decades to come. The authors of this volume were heavily involved in the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations that laid the foundations for the creation of the WTO, and were ideally placed to see how the politics of negotiation affects the economics of trade. The Political Economy of the World Trading System is the first comprehensive and accessible introduction to the institutional mechanics, economics, and politics of the global trading networks. It goes beyond description of the rules of the WTO to analyse the political and economic forces that sculpted them, the incentives for countries to abide by them, and the likely future direction of the organization. The authors show how governments are not necessarily the social welfare-maximizing entities often found in textbooks, but instead develop policy subject to the pressures of a variety of interest groups. Although economic theory suggests that countries should pursue liberal trade policies and exchange goods and services on the basis of their comparative advantage, in practice most nations actively intervene in international trade. The political economy approach taken in this volume explains how the WTO functions, why GATT has been very successful in reducing tariffs, and why it has proven much more difficult to expand the reach of multilateral disciplines to domestic policies impacting on trade. This book will increase the reader's understanding of international economics, business, and international relations by supplying in-depth insider knowledge of how trade negotiations take place, how this decision-making affects trade policy, and how the multilateral arrangements that shape world trade are created. This information is crucial to understand why WTO rules are phrased as they are, and to understand the processes by which business organizations, industrial associations, and political lobbies influence the multilateral trading system. In this expanded and thoroughly revised edition, the authors have taken account of the recent developments in international trade relations, included an extra chapter on the historical importance of international trading arrangements, and updated all the references and guides to further reading.

Understanding the reach and relevance of the organization is therefore important, and requires an interdisciplinary approach. Few countries allow unfettered market forces to determine the pattern and structure of trade and investment. Instead, governments develop policy in response to domestic political forces, taking into account likely reactions by trading partners. In discussing the WTO, the authors take a political economy-based approach that can explain these fundamental aspects of the 'real' world.

This book analyses one of the most controversial areas in the political economy of international trade, namely the issues surrounding the creation of new ‘trade rules’. Various concerns are addressed, including the environment, labour standards, intellectual property rights, trade facilitation, competition policy, investment and government procurement, to many conventional trade topics including the trade and development linkage. Nanda combines theoretical analysis with valuable insights derived from interactions with trade negotiators, politicians and activists, arguing for a dynamic policy framework, particularly in developing countries, with regular upgrading. He questions the effectiveness of the current global trade order in promoting development, highlighting not only the inability of conventional economics to capture the reality of international trade but also the neglect of some basic principles of economics. Nanda also argues that the WTO is not the right forum for addressing development issues because trade liberalization has traditionally been its objective.

World trade is governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO sets rules of conduct for the international trade of goods and services and for intellectual property rights, provides a forum for multinational negotiations to resolve trade problems, and has a formal mechanism for dispute settlement. It is the primary institution working, through rule-based bargaining, at freeing trade. In this book, Kyle Bagwell and Robert Staiger provide an economic analysis and justification for the purpose and design of the GATT/WTO. They summarize their own research, discuss the major features of the GATT agreement, and survey the literature on trade agreements. Their focus on the terms-of-trade externality is particularly original and ties the book together. Topics include the theory of trade agreements, the origin and design of the GATT and the WTO, the principles of reciprocity, the most favored nation principle, terms-of-trade theory, enforcement, preferential trade agreements, labor and environmental standards, competition policy, and agricultural export subsidies.