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Fairness in international trade and investment
Woolstencroft, Peter Bird, Frederick Vance, Thomas
Woolstencroft, Peter
Bird, Frederick
Vance, Thomas
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Since its birth in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WT0), successor to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), has grown rapidly – from an original 76 members to its current roster of 152. Membership growth has been accompanied by an expanding agenda. While GATT restricted itself to commercial trade issues, the WTO’s initial mandate was wider; and since then it has had to deal with myriad issues, especially pertaining to the environment and human rights, trade in services and intellectual property rights, unknown in the pre-WTO period. Some see the emergence of the WTO as the embodiment of globalization.1 Others see the WTO as not just a trade liberalizing vehicle but one that is oriented towards privatization of services – for example, health and education – that heretofore had been the prime responsibilities of governments; that is, they argue, the WTO’s agenda has come to include more than issues related to trade and investment; it has come to include a number of more valueladen social, economic, and political objectives. In this part we have not had space to consider how the rules with respect to trade in services and trade in agriculture might be amended in ways that would both work to the advantage of developing countries and still gain the political support from industrialized countries like Canada and the United States. These are clearly important topics that need to be addressed both fairly and practically in the current development round of the WTO is to have any chance of success.
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With permission of the license/copyright holder