The book explores the impact of recent WTO accession experiences on the development of the multilateral trading system.

Two high-level commissions—the Sutherland report in 2004, and the Warwick Commission report in 2007—addressed the future of the World Trade Organization and made proposals for incremental reform. This book goes further; it explains why institutional reform of the WTO is needed at this critical juncture in world history and provides innovative, practical proposals for modernizing the WTO to enable it to respond to the challenges of the twenty-first century. Contributors focus on five critical areas: transparency, decision- and rule-making procedures, internal management structures, participation by non-governmental organizations and civil society, and relationships with regional trade agreements. Co-published with the International Development Research Centre and the Centre for International Governance Innovation

Three significant issues will determine the future of the WTO: dispute settlement, negotiations and regional integration. Dispute settlement is widely regarded as one of the major successes of the WTO in its first ten years. Concluding the Doha round negotiations is one of its main challenges. Regional integration is now at the frontline of debate as regional agreements proliferate and policy-makers and academics come to grips with their impacts on the multilateral trading system. These issues, and the interplay between them, are examined by leading scholars and practitioners in the field of international trade law from North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. In addition, special sections focus on the Asia-Pacific region, its participation in WTO dispute settlement and negotiations, and recent trends towards greater regional integration.

The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce the first volume in an annual series, The World Trade Forum. The Forum's members include scholars, lawyers, and government and business practitioners working in the area of international trade, law, and policy. They meet annually and discuss integration issues in international economic relations, focusing on a new theme each year. The central topic of the first World Trade Forum is state trading. To what extent has trade liberalization, as we have experienced it over the last fifty years, affected property ownership? Contributors to the 1998 World Trade Forum explore this question, examining both state practice and the regulatory framework. Their discussions are divided into three parts: Part 1 looks at the World Trade Organization's legal framework for state trading enterprises, taking on such issues as monopolies and state enterprises, the WTO Antidumping Agreement and the economies in transition, and relationship of state trading and the Government Purchasing Act. Part 2 deals with regional experiences in state trading (for the EC, United States, Canada, Japan, China, and Russia). Part 3 examines conceptual issues such as auctions as a trade policy instrument and rule-making alternatives for entities with exclusive rights. The conclusion synthesizes the foregoing chapters in discussing the reach of modern international trade law. Contributors are Frederick Abbott, Ichiro Araki, Christian Bach, Jacques H. J. Bourgeois, Thomas Cottier, William J. Davey, Vladimir Dbrentsov, Toni Haniotis, Bernard M. Hoekman, Gary Horlick, Henrik Horn, Robert Howse, Patrick Low, Will Martin, Mitsuo Matsushita, Petros Mavroidis, Aaditya Mattoo, Patrick Messerlin, Constantine Michalopoulos, Kristin Heim Mowry, Stilpon Nestor, Damien Neven, N. David Palmeter, Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, André Sapir, Diane P. Wood, and Werner Zdouc. Petros Mavroidis is Professor of Law, University of Neuchatel. Thomas Cottier is Professor of Law, Institute of European and International Economic Law, University of Bern Law School.

ø Policy makers will benefit from the expert knowledge and policy lessons presented in this book, and development economists and researchers will profit from its critical examination of the world trading system. Undergraduate and postgraduate studen

World trade is governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO sets rules of conduct for the international trade of goods and services and for intellectual property rights, provides a forum for multinational negotiations to resolve trade problems, and has a formal mechanism for dispute settlement. It is the primary institution working, through rule-based bargaining, at freeing trade. In this book, Kyle Bagwell and Robert Staiger provide an economic analysis and justification for the purpose and design of the GATT/WTO. They summarize their own research, discuss the major features of the GATT agreement, and survey the literature on trade agreements. Their focus on the terms-of-trade externality is particularly original and ties the book together. Topics include the theory of trade agreements, the origin and design of the GATT and the WTO, the principles of reciprocity, the most favored nation principle, terms-of-trade theory, enforcement, preferential trade agreements, labor and environmental standards, competition policy, and agricultural export subsidies.

Despite troubled trade negotiations, global trade—and trade policy—will thrive in the twenty-first century, but with a bow to the past. Is the multilateral trading order of the twentieth century a historical artifact? Was the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 the high point of multilateral cooperation on trade? This new volume, edited by Bernard M. Hoekman and Ernesto Zedillo, assesses the relevance of the WTO in the context of the rise of China and the United States' turn toward unilateral protectionism. The contributors adopt a historical perspective to discuss changes in global trade policy trends, adducing lessons from the past to help understand current trade tensions. Topics include responses to U.S. protectionism under the Trump administration, the policy dimensions of trade in services and the rise of the digital economy, how to strengthen the WTO to better negotiate new rules of the game and adjudicate disputes, managing China's integration into the global trade system, and the implications of global value chains for economic development policies. By reflecting on past episodes of protectionism and how they were resolved, Trade in the 21st Century provides both context and guidance on how trade challenges can be addressed in the coming decades.

A review of the Heckscher–Ohlin framework prompts a noted economist to consider the methodology of economics. In this spirited and provocative book, Edward Leamer turns an examination of the Heckscher–Ohlin framework for global competition into an opportunity to consider the craft of economics: what economists do, what they should do, and what they shouldn't do. Claiming “a lifetime relationship with Heckscher–Ohlin,” Leamer argues that Bertil Ohlin's original idea offered something useful though vague and not necessarily valid; the economists who later translated his ideas into mathematical theorems offered something precise and valid but not necessarily useful. He argues further that the best economists keep formal and informal thinking in balance. An Ohlinesque mostly prose style can let in faulty thinking and fuzzy communication; a mostly math style allows misplaced emphasis and opaque communication. Leamer writes that today's model- and math-driven economics needs more prose and less math. Leamer shows that the Heckscher–Ohlin framework is still useful, and that there is still much work to be done with it. But he issues a caveat about economists: “What we do is not science, it's fiction and journalism.” Economic theory, he writes, is fiction (stories, loosely connected to the facts); data analysis is journalism (facts, loosely connected to the stories). Rather than titling the two sections of his book Theory and Evidence, he calls them Economic Fiction and Econometric Journalism, explaining, “If you find that startling, that's good. I am trying to keep you awake.”

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks attempt to link together at least nine countries in three continents to create a 'high-quality, twenty-first century agreement'. Such an agreement is intended to open markets to competition between the partners more than ever before in sectors ranging from goods and services to investment, and includes rigorous rules in the fields of intellectual property, labour protection and environmental conservation. The TPP also aims to improve regulatory coherence, enhance production supply chains and help boost small and medium-sized enterprises. It could transform relations with regions such as Latin America, paving the way to an eventual Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific, or see innovations translated into the global trade regulatory system operating under the WTO. However, given the tensions between strategic and economic concerns, the final deal could still collapse into something closer to a standard, 'twentieth-century' trade agreement.

Three significant issues will determine the future of the WTO: dispute settlement, negotiations and regional integration. Dispute settlement is widely regarded as one of the major successes of the WTO in its first ten years. Concluding the Doha round negotiations is one of its main challenges. Regional integration is now at the frontline of debate as regional agreements proliferate and policy-makers and academics come to grips with their impacts on the multilateral trading system. These issues, and the interplay between them, are examined by leading scholars and practitioners in the field of international trade law from North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. In addition, special sections focus on the Asia-Pacific region, its participation in WTO dispute settlement and negotiations, and recent trends towards greater regional integration.