In Power and the Governance of Global Trade, Soo Yeon Kim analyzes the design, evolution, and economic impact of the global trade regime, focusing on the power politics that prevailed in the regime and shaped its distributive impact on global trade. Using documents now available from the archives of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), Kim examines the institutional origins and critical turning points in the evolution of the GATT, as well as preferences of the lesser powers of the developing world that were the subject of heated debate over the International Trade Organization (ITO), which failed to materialize.Using quantitative analysis, Kim assesses the impact of the global trade regime on international trade and finds that the rules of trade forged by the great powers resulted in a developmental divide, in which industrialized countries benefited from trade expansion but developing countries reaped far fewer gains. The findings indicate that a successful conclusion to the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is urgently needed to mitigate the developmental divide by increasing trade between the industrialized and developing worlds.Kim offers a timely reading of the GATT/WTO system as a way to think about how trade and globalization more broadly may be governed in this post-Cold War century, as the global economy contends with a new geopolitical configuration featuring rising powers from the developing world. Important trading nations such as China, India, and other emergent actors in the G-20 countries, Kim argues, reflect the new power politics that will shape the course of global trade governance in the years to come.

One of the first analyses of the impact of US-China rivalry on the governance of global trade.

Cohn's topic of global trade is of enormous and proliferating interest. He provides a good background from 1945 to the present and on core contemporary themes such as civil society participation and the domesticisation of the trade agenda. Whilst there is a wealth of literature on policy-oriented aspects such as negotiating rounds, there are few that provide the careful, comprehensive historical overview that this work offers and none that do so with reference to international institutions such as the G7, Quad, OECD, and UNCTAD as well as the WTO in global trade governance. This seminal work has been awarded the British Columbia Political Science Association Weller Prize for 2003. Cohn's political science background will appeal directly to a university audience and a broader public policy market. It is also suitable for those interested in trade in the cognates of economics and law. This work's theoretical framework embraces and synthesises the major approaches in the field of international relations and will be appropriate for the dominant schools of realists and liberal institutionalists alike. It could therefore be apt for courses on international relations theory or international political economy taught in a theoretical mode. This book reinforces and broadens the focus of all previous works in The G8 and Global Governance series.

Rorden Wilkinson explores the factors behind the collapse of World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerials - as in Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003 - and asks why such events have not significantly disrupted the development of the multilateral trading system. He argues that the political conflicts played out during such meetings, their occasional collapse and the reasons why such events have so far not proven detrimental to the development of the multilateral trading system can be explained by examining the way in which the institution was created and has developed through time. In addition, this new text: explores the development of the multilateral trading system from the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 to the WTO's Hong Kong ministerial in December 2005 examines the way in which the interaction of member states has been structured by the institution's development assesses the impact of institutional practices and procedures on the heightening of political tensions and explains why WTO ministerials exhibit a propensity to collapse but why the breakdown of a meeting has so far not prevented the institution from moving forward This book will be of interest to scholars and students of international politics, economics and law

This book takes a fresh and much needed perspective on the challenges of trade policy and explores possible futures for trade policy development. By taking the perspective of business studies, the book does not only focus on the economic, policy, or legislative perspectives, but views trade policy as a part of international business environment. The purpose of this book is to bring forward discussions on trade policy development and future development needs and offers a comprehensive read for international business researchers, practitioners and policymakers regarding the interconnections of trade policy and international business.

Writing Global Trade Governance operationalises a key post-structuralist methodology in order to expand understanding on the institution at the heart of the global political economy. Despite the WTO's centrality and the growing popularity of methods utilizing discourse theory, no other text has yet demonstrated how these two fields of learning can be productively combined. The book seeks to move beyond existing literatures that assume the WTO to be a structure, institution or normative framework, in order to enquire into the discursive processes of identity formation that make the WTO both possible and contested. The book criticises conventional approaches that treat critical civil society as distinct to the WTO, arguing instead that it is only through including such social practices within the field of relations making the WTO that we can properly understand what makes the WTO work. The book presents an empirical analysis of the discursive character of the present-day WTO (including its formation and operation) and then moves on to evaluate how it is subject to change within a broader social context. The final stage of the book seeks to discuss the impact of the findings on future research, both on the WTO and other institutions. This work is a significant intervention in the literature on the World Trade Organization and the politics of global trade and social movements, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of global governance, discourse theory and international organizations