A major achievement of the 1990s was the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which superseded the GATT and provided a stronger institutional foundation for international trading arrangements among countries. As an international organization, it faces a number of challenges, including achieving agreement over trade in services, bringing in new members from the economies in transition and developing countries, making the strengthened dispute settlement mechanism effective, and bringing about an increasingly open multilateral trading system. In this volume, some of the world’s foremost authorities analyse the challenges and opportunities confronting the WTO. An introductory chapter provides an overview of the WTO’s current operation. Two papers focus on the WTO’s relationship to developing countries and countries in transition. Other chapters address the WTO’s institutional capacity directly, through such issues as the way national policies may influence or constrain the WTO, the difficulties of achieving coherence with the World Bank and the IMF, and the resources available to the WTO’s secretariat in relation to the tasks it faces. Contemporary policy issues facing the WTO, including how to bring services trade into the open multilateral framework and how other concerns such as labour standards and environmental issues, may be addressed, are also discussed. This volume is a comprehensive and timely introduction to the WTO’s situation in the global economy and will appeal to anyone interested in world trade.
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