43 research outputs found
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Crisis in CancĂșn
Member states of the WTO met unsuccessfully in CancĂșn to discuss progress in the Doha Development Agenda (DDA). The task was to relieve the deadlock plaguing the trade agenda and in so doing agree to concessions designed to address the development concerns of the Global South, while placating the Northâs desire to begin negotiations on the so-called Singapore issues. Should a political settlement be agreed post-CancĂșn, the vulnerability of developing states is likely to be exacerbated. The only way to address both this potential danger and to remove some of the inertia plaguing the WTO is to place a moratorium on the negotiations of the Singapore issues and to concentrate instead on addressing the development dimension of the DDA. The problem for the industrial world is that to do so would be politically damaging. But for the most vulnerable, maintaining the present course brings with it greater risks
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Building asymmetry: concluding the Doha Development Agenda
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Managing global civil society: the WTO's engagement with NGOs
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Multilateral trade and the post 2015 development agenda
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Language, power and multilateral trade negotiations
Warnings that a breakdown in multilateral trade liberalization would bring about an upsurge in protectionist sentiment, the possible collapse of the multilateral trading system and, in the most doomsday of scenarios, the fragmentation of the global economy have been an intrinsic part of trade negotiations since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was first negotiated.What is seldom acknowledged, however, is the role that this language of crisis and collapse - what might be called a 'crisis discourse' - has had on framing trade negotiations and in maintaining forward momentum in the liberalization process. This discourse has played a role in facilitating the kind of institutional development that the GATT and the World Trade Organization (WTO) has undergone - helping to push through bargains among GATT contracting parties and WTO members that have been (and remain) deeply asymmetrical - and driving the trade agenda forward at moments when the institution appears deadlocked; and it has continued to play a role in the current round of negotiations. The aims of the paper are twofold. First, the paper explores the content of the crisis discourse. Second, it examines the way in which the discourse has been deployed as a means of reframing trade negotiations in such a way that the likelihood of their continuation and ultimate conclusion increases. The paper does this by focusing on the collapse and resumption of the negotiations in the wake of the WTO's 2005 Hong Kong ministerial meeting, though the crisis discourse and its intensification at moments of intransigence has been a key feature of trade negotiations since the Allies first sat down to develop a trade architecture in the wartime and early post-war years. © 2009 Taylor & Francis
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The WTO in crisis: exploring the dimensions of institutional inertia
The failure of the Seattle Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to launch a much hyped Millennium Round of trade negotiations has attracted a good deal of journalistic and scholarly comment. Beyond this, some debate exist as to whether the WTO also ought to deal with pushing the trade agenda forward as well as addressing a range of social and environmental issues. A different reading of the sources of the WTO's current inertia is offered by placing Seattle within the context of the evolution of post-war international trade regulation. Utilizing an analytical framework extracted from comparative and international politics - historical institutionalism - it argues that the roots of the WTO's intertia lie not with The Seattle Ministerial Meeting, nor even with the post-Uruguay era, but with the creation of institutionalized trade regulation in the post-war period
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Global governance and the World Trade Organization
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The WTO in Hong Kong: what it really means for the Doha Development Agenda
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Measuring the WTO's performance: an alternative account
This article offers an alternative account of the performance of the World Trade Organization (WTO) - an institution whose performance is usually assessed in terms of its capacity to function as a forum for the exchange of mutually beneficial trade concessions, its ability to act as an arena in which trade rules can be negotiated and its capacity to serve as a forum for settling trade disputes. The article argues that when understood in these ways, the performance of the WTO inevitably appears lacklustre. However, the fact that member states remain committed suggests that the criteria on which an assessment of the institution's performance ought to be based are different and the way in which we conceive of the institution is flawed. The article argues that if WTO performance is measured as the institution's capacity to act as a strategic device to maintain and exacerbate the advantages of a group of industrial states over their less powerful and developing counterparts (an aim that is much closer to the institution's intended purpose), then it has actually been quite successful, albeit undesirably so. © 2011 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd