The Global Trading System and the Developing Countries in 2000

1999 is likely to be a watershed year for the world trading system. The Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November/December hopes to chart a course for global trade policy in the early part of the twenty-first century. The European Union, Japan, the United States, and Canada--the Quadrilateral Group that functions as an informal steering committee for the system--and many other countries have already agreed to use that occasion to launch a Millennium Round of multilateral negotiations to liberalize trade further and write new rules to govern additional types of economic transactions among nations.