Less developed countries and market access for manufactured exports : North-South bargaining and the quest for reform

This study examines the evolution of international negotiations between the developed and developing countries in connection with the attempts of the latter to obtain improved access to the markets of the rich industrial countries for exports of manufactured products. The primary focus is on the bargaining which has taken place in two distinct institutional settings—the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Although the period covered by the study is the entire thirty-five years since the end of the Second World War, most of the discussion relates to the period since 1964, the year of UNGTAD's creation. In seeking to explain both the successes and failures of the developing countries in their efforts to obtain improved market access, use is made of several different analytical approaches currently employed by international relations scholars. A major concern of the study is to analyze how valuable or insightful these various approaches appear to be with respect to the particular case under examination here. Some schools of thought ascribe considerable bargaining power to relatively weak actors in international politics, but in case of manufactured exports the developing countries, who lack influence in this issue area, are shown to possess little leverage in negotiating for better access to the markets of developed economies. It is the vulnerability and weakness of developing countries that must be stressed in seeking to portray how they are situated in relation to this important area of international political and economic relations.Arts, Faculty ofPolitical Science, Department ofGraduat

Patents and pills, power and procedure: the North-South politics of public health in the WTO

Developing countries have limited control over the distributional and substantive dimensions of international institutions, but they retain an important stake in a rule-based international order that can reduce uncertainty and stabilize expectations. Because international institutions can provide small states with a potential mechanism to bind more powerful states to mutually recognized rules, developing countries may seek to strengthen the procedural dimensions of multilateral institutions. Clear and strong multilateral rules cannot substitute for weakness, but they can help ameliorate some of the vulnerability that is a product of developing countries’ position in the international system. This article uses the contemporary international politics of intellectual property rights (IPRs) as a lens to examine North-South conflicts over international economic governance and the possibilities of institutional reform. Lacking the power to revise the substance of the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), developing countries, allied with a network of international public health activists, subsequently designed strategies to operate within the constraining international political reality they faced. They sought to clarify the rules of international patent law, to affirm the rights established during the TRIPS negotiations, and to minimize vulnerability to opportunism by powerful states. In doing so the developing countries reinforced global governance in IPRs