Governance of global trade

The focus of this chapter is on the institutions and rules that govern world trade. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been locked in a protracted negotiation process ever since 2001, when the Doha Development Agenda was launched. Hence the following articles offer different analyses and recommendations for the improved governance of international trade. Governments around the world recurrently face pressures to withdraw from the multilateral rules-based trading system designed on the legitimacy of a set of principles and norms that have allowed global trade to liberalize and flourish. At the heart of these GATT principles lies non-discrimination.

The opening article contends that the failure to conclude the WTO negotiations exposes serious flaws in the architecture of trade governance and global economic governance more generally. The following two contributions propose a set of reforms to render the WTO more effective and adapted to the structures of the world political economy. This is then complemented by an approach to opposing protectionism in the coming decades and an analysis of the ways in which regional agreements can be pushed towards convergence with multilateral principles.

The build-up and sustainability of global imbalances is the subject of the next two articles, both of which underline the importance of international policy coordination to deal with tensions and cascading effects. We then turn our attention to three trade-related issues often surrounded in controversy: the rules and enforcement of intellectual property rights, current patterns of subsidy use, and the institutional linkages between trade and migration in a world undergoing substantial spatial transformations.