Without transparency, trade agreements are just words on paper. Transparency as disclosure allows economic actors and trading partners to see how rules are implanted; transparency in decision-making ensures fairness and peer review. In the first section of this paper, I discuss the logic of...

Carbon labels providing information about the carbon footprints associated with food products might influence consumer purchases, which would have a differential effect on producers throughout global food chains. We first discuss why any labels work and then describe the mechanics of carbon...

Despite the presence of food miles labels and carbon labels on the market for many years, relatively little data is available on how consumers respond to these labels. It is one thing to show people saying in surveys they will use carbon labels, and quite another to have evidence of people...

For two decades agriculture has been the lynchpin of every meeting of the world's trade ministers. The Hong Kong ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2005 was no different. Once again, a multilateral trade round is blocked by failure to agree on reform of farm...

Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) proceed simultaneously, not sequentially, and all Members must accept all the results. I show that the so-called Single Undertaking is both a negotiation technique and a constitutive metaphor. It...

People at home and trade negotiators in Geneva cannot bargain what they do not understand, and what they bargain must be based on consensual understanding among the relevant actors, whether or not they agree on what to do about it. Consensual understanding is endogenous, arising in an...