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Considers the dying of multilateral negotiations and agreements all over the planet in the face of the global recession, with a particular focus on the WTO and as to what, if to any extent the WTO can in any way help to ameliorate the financial crisis. Especially fearful is protectionist stances that many countries seem desirous of taking, which could put a freeze on global trade. Looks at the history of the WTO, ITO, IMF, World Bank and the GATT, as they stood and now stand. The WTO, it would seem, is mired in numerous internal and external conundrums that may be unsolveable, at least at present. Also examines the Warwick Commission Report and its findings, such as the multitude of sides vying for power and attention on the global trade front, before describing numerous articles featured in the journal, along with goals that those authors hope to see achieved. Adapted from the source document.

Rising current account and merchandise trade imbalances marked the years before the global financial and economic crisis. These imbalances either contributed to or precipitated the crisis and to the extent that they create systemic risks, it is desirable that they be reduced. There are many factors related to macroeconomic, structural, exchange rate and financial policies that contributed to the imbalances. The inability to manage these issues at the international level reflects the coherence gap in global governance. This paper examines the contribution that the WTO can make in its three areas of activities - negotiations, rule-making and dispute settlement - to deal with trade imbalances and with the main factors leading to them, including exchange rate misalignments. First, market opening efforts in services, including in the area of financial services, can reduce policy-related distortions and market imperfections in surplus countries that lead to the build-up of unsustainable imbalances. Second, in the context of a broad international effort to coordinate macroeconomic, exchange rate and structural policies to deal with the roots of imbalances (the first-best solution), there is a general efficiency argument that could be made for the use of WTO-triggered trade actions to enforce cooperative behaviour towards rebalancing. Absent this first-best response, trade rules alone would not provide an efficient instrument to compensate for the weaknesses in international co-operation in macroeconomic, exchange rate and structural policies.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) stands at the center of an emerging structure of global economic governance. Its rules affect important aspects of everyone's lives--how much people pay for the products that they purchase, what types of employment are open to them, and which medicines they can access. And yet, while the WTO was conceived as a "negotiating machine" that would develop rules in sync with an increasingly dynamic global economy, negotiations on a new set of global trade rules have now been deadlocked for over a decade. This impasse is all the more surprising in light of the fact that the multilateral trade regime was, up until the establishment of the WTO in 1995, one of the most productive engines of international lawmaking. The present Article explores why multilateral trade lawmaking used to work, and why it is no longer working today. A key part of the answer is that before the establishment of the WTO, the multilateral trading system worked as a "club," which allowed the major trading powers to manipulate the circle of participants in trade negotiations depending on how these powers weighed the costs and benefits of the participation of additional states. The Article identifies three factors that led the major trading nations to adopt this approach: (1) the greater practicality of negotiations among a smaller group of countries,(2) the insiders' greater influence on the outcome of the negotiations, and (3) the chance to subsequently compel outsiders to join the agreement on the insiders' terms. The Article shows how the major trading powers were able to implement the club approach to multilateral trade lawmaking throughout the pre-WTO era-an ability that accounts for much of the legislative dynamism of that time. The Article then argues that the founding of the WTO, while itself an example of the successful employment of the club logic, has made the use of the club approach in the multilateral trading system much more difficult, if not impracticable. As a result, the pace of lawmaking in the ...