This volume comes at a very crucial time in international economic relations. Never before has the world been closer to dismantling the liberal multilateral trading system that has been so painstakingly put together since the end of the Second World War and served the world so well since then.

Support for a liberal trading system in the United States has weakened considerably during the past decade and has given way to aggressive unilateralism. Japan's export successes and industrial targeting, in the face of serious Japanese institutional barriers against imports from the rest of the world, have resulted in serious frictions with the United States and Europe. European agricultural and industrial protectionism has put serious strains on the system.

The breaking up of the world into three major trading blocs can potentially have ominous consequences for the world trading system and can lead straight down the path of managed trade. Even the time-honoured theory that a free-trading system maximizes world welfare and the welfare of each trading nation has recently come under attack by strategic trade theory and policy.

All of these problems and trends are leading the world toward a trading system that is much less liberal, multilateral, and global than the one to which we have grown accustomed – to the detriment of all. The stalling of the Uruguay Round also means that a crucial opportunity to reverse or at least to contain these dangerous trends and set the world back on a liberalizing track has been missed.