The History and Future of the World Trade Organization is a comprehensive account of the economic, political and legal issues surrounding the creation of the WTO and its evolution. Fully illustrated with colour and black-and-white photos dating back to the early days of trade negotiations, the publication reviews the WTO's achievements as well as the challenges faced by the organisation, and identifies the key questions that WTO members need to address in the future. The book describes the intellectual roots of the trading system, membership of the WTO and the growth of the Geneva trade community, trade negotiations and the development of coalitions among the membership, and the WTO's relations with other international organisations and civil society. Also covered are the organisation's robust dispute settlement rules, the launch and evolution of the Doha Round, the rise of regional trade agreements, and the leadership and management of the WTO.

This research explores how multilateralism in trade has worked over the past twenty years - and provides some lessons about how it can work in the future. It describes the WTO's achievements across a number of key areas, including: strengthening the institutional foundations of the trade system; widening its membership and increasing participation; deepening trade integration through lower barriers and stronger rules; improving transparency and policy dialogue; strengthening dispute settlement; expanding cooperation with other international organizations; and enhancing public outreach. It concludes that the WTO has achieved much over its first twenty years but the success of the WTO has inevitably given rise to new challenges.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) recently celebrated twenty years of existence. The general wisdom is that its dispute settlement institutions work well and its negotiation machinery goes through a phase of prolonged crises. Assessing the World Trade Organization overcomes this myopic view and takes stock of the WTO's achievements whilst going beyond existing disciplinary narratives. With chapters written by scholars who have closely observed the development of the WTO in recent years, this book presents the state of the art in thinking about WTO performance. It also considers important issues such as the origins of the multilateral system, the accession process and the WTO's interaction with other international organisations. The contributions shed new light on untold stories, critically review and present existing scholarship, and sketch new research avenues for a future generation of trade scholars. This book will appeal to a wide audience that aims to better understand the drivers and obstacles of WTO performance.

Two high-level commissions—the Sutherland report in 2004, and the Warwick Commission report in 2007—addressed the future of the World Trade Organization and made proposals for incremental reform. This book goes further; it explains why institutional reform of the WTO is needed at this critical juncture in world history and provides innovative, practical proposals for modernizing the WTO to enable it to respond to the challenges of the twenty-first century. Contributors focus on five critical areas: transparency, decision- and rule-making procedures, internal management structures, participation by non-governmental organizations and civil society, and relationships with regional trade agreements. Co-published with the International Development Research Centre and the Centre for International Governance Innovation

This book explains the rise of China, India, and Brazil in the international trading system, and the implications for trade law.

This book offers a skilled arms-length evaluation, from a legal perspective, of the main criticisms that have been leveled recently at the key global economic organizations – that is, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and its fellow multilateral developmental banks (MDBs), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORGANIZATIONS stands out from most of the growing body of literature on the IMF, MDBS, and the WTO in two main respects: the book’s scope and the author’s experience. Whereas numerous commentators have focused on particular strengths and weaknesses of one or the other of the GEOs, and have argued for changes on the basis of specific areas of operation, this book takes a wider view to examine all the GEOs at once. This broader scope reveals commonalities in the criticisms. For example, complaints about so-called “democracy deficit” obviously can be applied to all GEOs but with different nuances in emphasis and sting. Against the background of his own experience as a legal counsel for one of the regional MDBs and for the IMF and a legal career that has focused on international economic law, Head distills the swarm of complaints leveled at the IMF, MDBS, and the WTO into 25 specific criticisms and then offers succinct explanations of why some of those criticisms should be dismissed, why some of them are valid, and how those valid criticisms should form the basis for an important restructuring of the institutions, including amendments to the charters that establish and govern their operations. Head speaks largely to three audiences here: persons in various professional positions; persons in national governments and politics around the world who are responsible for implementing their government’s foreign policy; and to more general curious readers on whose involvement in civic life any society ultimately depends. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.