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. --

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.

Takes stock of current challenges to the world trading system and develops scenarios for the future.

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

China's historic accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in November 2001 not only represents an important milestone in the country’s transition to a market economy and integration into the global economy, but is also among the most important events in the history of the WTO and the multilateral trading system. China and Global Trade Governance: China's First Decade in the World Trade Organization provides us with some fresh empirical data to assess the country’s behaviour in the liberal international economic regime. Such an assessment is both timely and necessary as it can help us better understand China’s role in the evolving structure of global economic governance, in addition to shedding light on the broader debate about the implications of the rise of China for the international system. Through a thorough examination of China’s WTO compliance record and its experience in multilateral trade negotiations, this book seeks to better understand the sources of constraints on China’s behaviour in the multilateral trade institution as well as the country’s influence on the efficacy of the World Trade Organization. In doing so, this project speaks directly to the following questions raised by China’s unprecedented ascent in the international system: Is China a rule maker, rule follower, or rule breaker in international regimes? Is Beijing a responsible stakeholder capable of making positive contributions to global trade governance in the long-term?

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.

On World Food Day in October 2008, former president Bill Clinton finally accepted decade-old criticism directed at his administration's pursuit of free-trade deals with little regard for food safety, child labor, or workers' rights. "We all blew it, including me when I was president. We blew it. We were wrong to believe that food was like some other product in international trade." Clinton's public admission came at a time when consumers in the United States were hearing unsettling stories about contaminated food, toys, and medical products from China, and the first real calls were being made for more regulation of imported products. Import Safety comes at a moment when public interest is engaged with the subject and the government is receptive to the idea of consumer protections that were not instituted when many of the Clinton era's free-trade pacts were drafted. Written by leading scholars and analysts, the chapters in Import Safety provide background and policy guidance on improving consumer safety in imported food, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and toys and other products aimed at children. Together, they consider whether policymakers should approach import safety issues through better funding of traditional interventions—such as regulatory oversight and product liability—or whether this problem poses a different kind of governance challenge, requiring wholly new methods.