In its less than 20 years of existence, the WTO has managed to draw public attention. Transparency in the WTO decision-making has been in the agenda of the multilateral trading system for several years. Pressures from developing countries and nongovernmental organizations in particular have led...

Almost eight years after the launch of the Doha Round, the WTO negotiations remain mired in a swamp of detail, with many participants unwilling or unable to make the hard decisions which would bring the Round to a conclusion. Meanwhile, the world has changed dramatically with the onset of a...

Internet is a global market place. The rapid development of the Internet, and especially of Internet-based commerce, has largely taken place outside the standard trade-regulatory frameworks that cover most other forms of cross-border commerce. As the size of the Internet markets has grown, and...

In recent years we have witnessed the crisis in the multilateral trading system, primarily because of the inability of the Doha Development Agenda to produce results after 17 years of negotiations. The reasons are complex large number of participants in these negotiations which complicates...

The data issued by the WTO Secretariat on disputes shows that "developing countries" have participated in one-third of the cases 1995-2005. The data should be corrected to exclude some OECD member countries and some others with high GDP per capita. These adjustments reduce by about 30 the number...

All dogs have fleas, therefore all dogs have legs with which to scratch. Similarly, any government committed to a generally open trade policy will be pestered for ‘import relief’ by one industry or another – usually on grounds that its situation is ‘exceptional.’ It follows that...

Trade remedies have served the GATT/WTO system well in that they have provided the mechanisms for Member governments to manage protectionist pressures so that new import restrictions have minimally compromised the momentum of liberalization that negotiations have established. They are however an...

As part of the Doha Development Agenda many members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in particular its Director-General have actively promoted the so-called Aid-for-Trade initiative. Rather than offer a comprehensive account of this initiative, the purpose here is to consider its...

This paper explores Japan’s role in reshaping the global pharmaceutical intellectual property regime by examining its position on the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPR) in negotiations for two regional trade agreements: the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and the...

To date, government procurement has been effectively carved out of the main multilateral rules of the WTO system. This paper examines the systemic and other ramifications of this exclusion, from both an economic and a legal point of view. In addition to relevant elements of the WTO Agreements,...