If sustainable development is about the integration of economic and environmental goals, then there seems to be a signiacant lack of integration between the preeminent global governance structures set up to manage trade and environment respectively. The international trade regime has evolved into one of the most powerful and inouential multilateral regimes in the world today in terms of its abi...

Regional Trading Arrangements (RTAs) have always posed problems for the GATT/WTO. Although during the negotiations leading up to the GATT it appeared as if tight restrictions would be placed on the creation of RTAs, in the event US foreign policy considerations led to much weaker rules being adopted. And since then, geo-political forces have prevented the system from enforcing even these weaker...

World leaders meeting at the G8 summit in St Petersburg last month had hoped for at least one outcome: a boost to the flagging world trade negotiations in the current round that have been struggling since their initiation in Doha in 2001. Agreement must be reached this month if progress is to be made in this round. Issues are many and various, but in Europe one battle between EU member states a...

Louise Johannesson (2018): Settling disputes at the World Trade Organization. Örebro Studies in Economics 38 This cumulative dissertation consists of five self-contained essays, all of which are closely focused around issues that concern the WTO dispute settlement mechanism (DSM). In Essay 1, we describe salient features of the DSM using a unique data set. We observe a spike in new disputes in ...

China has opened up its telecommunication equipments market for nearly two decades and many equipment manufacturers generate most of the revenues form this market. With China’s imminent entry of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the foreign investors are eager to occupy the Chinese telecommunications services market, which is currently closed to foreign investments. To find a niche in this ma...

This article aims to describe the circumstances and development of the first significant trade dispute involving the regulatory views on genetically engineered (GE, referred to as genetically modified, GM, in the European Legislation) crops. It will also show how the World Trade Organization (WTO) managed through this complex case, which—in addition to its basic long standing rules—was called t...

Why? Because though the US, back in 1948, blocked the formation of an International Trade Organisation (ITO), believing that, at that time, the interests of its corporations would not be served by such a global body, it had changed its mind by the 1990s. Now it wanted an international trade body. Why? Because its global economic dominance was threatened. The flexible GATT (General Agreement on ...