World Trade and WTO

An Introduction to WTO

For an introduction to the WTO system and its historical background, see the following books and articles :

1) The World Trade Organization: Law, Practice, and Policy, by Mitsuo Matsushita, Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Petros C. Mavroidis

 

2) Petersmann, E.-U., ‘The Transformation of the World Trading System through the 1994 Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization’, European Journal of International Law, Vol. 6 (1995) No. 2, pp. 161-221 (in PDF format).

“The 1994 Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the most ambitious attempt in history at promoting welfare-increasing policies through international guarantees of freedom, non-discrimination and rule of law in the ever more important field of worldwide economic relations. In many respects, such as the protection of individual rights (e.g., of access to courts and intellectual property rights) and the establishment of a mandatory global dispute settlement system, it goes beyond the postwar `UN Constitution’ for the conduct of foreign policies. Its `integration’ of international rules on trade in goods, services, trade-related investment measures, environmental measures and intellectual property rights, reinforced by the WTO’s `Trade Policy Review Mechanism’ and integrated dispute settlement system, is also more ambitious than the stillborn 1948 Havana Charter for an International Trade Organization (save for the Havana Charter rules on restrictive business practices and intergovernmental commodity agreements). It introduces a new kind of worldwide integration law with far-reaching implications for other existing international organizations, such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

This contribution begins with a brief review of the difficulties of `constitutionalizing’ foreign policies in national and international law (Chapter I) and of the `constitutional’ problems of the world trading system (Chapter II), which make its reform such a hard task. Chapters III and IV analise the contents of the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements, their `constitutional functions’ and their underlying `public choice strategies’, which made it possible to conclude the Uruguay Round successfully. The paper ends with a brief outlook at the WTO agenda for future negotiations. The methods and value premises of this paper – i.e. liberal constitutional theory, `public choice’ theory and economic analysis of law – are explained in Chapter II.C in the hope of stimulating a broader discussion on the need for a more realistic theory of international relations, of international law and of international organizations” (abstract of the Introduction of Petersman’s article).