The SPS Agreement in the WTO gives legal validity to the CODEX standards. Since the developed countries have been at the forefront of setting the food standards in the CODEX, the developing countries have been increasingly engaged in the CODEX, and also in the WTO, with an objective to increase their exports of the agricultural and food products. But such objective and desire have often been st...

In this paper I consider implications of China’s recent and ongoing reforms in intellectual property rights (IPRs) as it attains membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO). I discuss the consistency of China’s IPRs laws with WTO requirements and indicate outstanding issues. I then present basic economic theory of the need for IPRs, distinguishing among patents, trademarks, trade secrets, ...

Abstract We look at the effect of WTO on stabilizing international trade using both a fixed-effects and an event study approach. Our results show that members experience lower volatilties in predictable integrated system. In addition, we focus volatility comovement among countries multilateral framework. Previous research has mainly focused membership bilateral framework, which only allows inte...

For a long time, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been seen as privileged multilateral regime to regulate trade. However, given its slow progress in negotiating new trade rules, countries have increasingly shifted their focus preferential agreements (PTAs) since early 2000s. Focusing on timely and important topic (digital trade), we explore how countries’ interactions WTO impact approache...

negotiations among nations on policies to promote international economic integration have widened in recent years to cover new issues; for example, foreign direct investment rules, policies to promote competition, the international movement of labor, the environment and monetary :union:. in these negotiations, a consensus among the parties negotiating is usually lacking and many of these negoti...

This paper uses theories of policy learning and of policy-making to examine how global institutions such as the WTO can influence policy choices. In pure learning by doing, policy choices are based on information relating to the history of an active policy; there is no information on alternative policies. New information on priors provides an incentive to choose a different policy. In the case ...

Depending on how one classifies market intervention, trade liberalization disciplines can be lenient or strict. Perhaps the most important distinction in this respect is that between government intervention labeled as a ‘market access restriction’ and that defined as ‘domestic regulation’. Both the GATT and the GATS declare market access restrictions (such as import quotas or limitations on the...

Developing countries are now the dominant voting bloc in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Many developing countries, especially the least developed, maintain that the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture did little or nothing to benefit them. While many of these countries have presented proposals in the WTO for revisions to the agreement, most of these countries have limited analytical cap...

The reaction of U.S. farm groups and our trading partners to the new farm bill has been surprisingly frank and sometimes harsh. Many farm groups have given up the argument that farm subsidies are temporary measures needed until good times return. For example, Mississippi Delta cotton farmer Kenneth Hood (who is also chairman of the National Cotton Council) was recently quoted in the Wall Street...

This article argues that the narrow definition of conflict apparently prevailing in international law doctrine and recent WTO rulings is inappropriate in terms of legal theory and in view of the fundamental structures of the international legal order. The problem with this strict definition is that it does not recognize that a permissive norm may conflict with a prescriptive norm. In this persp...