Background

Since its creation out of the prior General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has attracted the interests of many. Individuals, corporations, governments, policy makers, NGOs, and academics are drawn to study this international organisation which has in such a short time made significant impact on the lives of all people in our global community.

With over 20,000 pages of legal documents comprising WTO negotiated agreements over trade and other trade related issues and a plethora of decisions reached under the various dispute settlement cases brought before the Dispute Settlement Body of the Organisation, the legal framework of the WTO presents a formidable mass of scholarly material. Research into the activities of the organisation has been remarkable and varied. It has ranged from analyses of the general practicability of a rules-based approach to trade regulation, to recurrent arguments over the potential gains of participation in a rules-based system for less developed country members of the Organisation.

This latter scope of research activity has occupied the interests of scholars in both developing and developed countries. Most of the work done in this area has been preoccupied with identifying the importance of global market integration for developing countries. The literature has centred on particular aspects of developing country participation – agriculture and the need for greater access to developed country markets; the restrictions of the agreement on Intellectual Property which confront those countries which have not evolved a strong intellectual property framework prior to their accession to the WTO; the challenges of assuming further obligations on new proposals in trade negotiations without a sufficient capacity for entering into trade negotiations in the first place. This work in contrast, presents a holistic view: the view that what is important is to identify the nature and potential of the WTO as an organisation which can contribute to the socio-economic well-being of individuals and societies across the world as they engage in global economic endeavour.

The research here is at a more fundamental level, and offers concrete reviews of WTO action in line with the Organisation's development obligations. Much has been made of developing countries and the problems they confront with implementing the obligations in accordance with the ‘single undertaking’ requirement of accepting all the agreements under the WTO as binding.