Mega free trade agreements (FTAs) are being formed to fill the gap created by new developments in global governance and are reshaping the world economic order. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is one of such 21st century FTAs. This book highlights three trade-related issues covered by the TPP that greatly concern emerging countries – investment, intellectual property rights (IPR), and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). It contains rigorous economic, legal, and political analyses on the final text of the agreement, combined with country-specific policy discussions focusing on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam, giving readers insights on the establishment of global rules and regulations for 21st century trade. The book also outlines the requirements for emerging Asian countries to better formulate trade policies in the new era of international trade and promote regional integration in ASEAN and East Asia.

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

TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), currently under negotiation among 11 countries of the Asia Pacific region, would become a path-breaking free trade agreement (FTA) of the 21st century. This book is the first academic attempt to locate the TPP within the broad context of the changing global trade governance and global business environment. The book aims for an objective and accurate prediction of the final text of the TPP, based on publicly available sources of information, and elucidates the impacts of the TPP upon the economy and regulatory systems of its member countries. Focusing on the backgrounds and prospects of TPP, the book explores the emerging global trade governance provided by the TPP, which would eventually be completed by the restructuring and reinvigoration of the WTO. The book also elucidates the causes and dynamics which had led the U.S. to take the initiative to tackle on them through the TPP. This book also synthesizes the analysis and makes a projection of the developments of the global trade governance in the 21st century after the TPP. The book concludes by making a set of policy proposals for the reconstruction of the global trade governance by avoiding the worst pessimistic scenario, and hence, it is to be seriously considered by major stakeholders of global trade governance including governments, firms, international organizations and the general public.

The international institutions that have governed global trade since the end of World War II have lost their effectiveness, and global trade governance is fractured. The need for new institutions is obvious, and yet, few proposals seem to be on offer. The key to understanding the global trading order lies in uncovering the relationship between trade and the State, and how the inner constitution of Statecraft drives the architecture of the global order and requires structural changes as the State traverses successive cycles. The current trade order, focused on the liberalization of trade in goods and services and the management of related issues, is predicated on policies and practices that were the product of a global trading order of the 20th-century modern nation-states. Today, a new form of the State - the post-modern State - is evolving. In this book, the authors propose a new trade norm - the enablement of global economic opportunity - and a new institution - the Trade Council - to overhaul the global trading order.

Discussion of the governance of global trade and the multilateral trading system is too often dominated by developed-country scholars and opinion-makers, with inadequate attention given to developing country perspectives. Making Global Trade Governance Work for Development gathers a diversity of developing country views on how to improve the governance of global trade and the WTO to better advance sustainable development and respond to the needs of developing countries. With contributions by senior scholars, commentators and practitioners, the essays combine new, empirically-grounded research with practical insights about the trade policy-making process. They consider the specific governance issues of interest to developing countries and acknowledge the changing dynamics in the global economy and in trade decision-making.

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

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.