Among the many trade conoicts that divide the postindustrial economies of Europe, the United States, Japan, and the Commonwealth from the less information-driven economies of the rest of the world, one of the most consequential is the debate over how to balance access to medicines with the intellectual property protection demanded by their developers. Among the many facets of this debate is the...

The abundant literature about institutions regards the postwar trade regime as its " beau ideal " (Goldstein, Rivers, and Tomz 2007a, 38). Yet, it was only five years ago that Andrew Rose published the first systematic empirical analysis of its effects. Contravening conventional wisdom, he found that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization, did...

As implementation of the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) accelerates and states seek to address risk factors for non-communicable disease more broadly, tension has increased between the law of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and public health. For example, Indonesia recently brought a successful claim against a U.S. law that prohibits cigarettes...

• There is no single ’African view’ of what a development-friendly WTO compromise would look like • African countries benefit and suffer from subsidies, depending on their products and export markets • African countries should prioritise their development needs and build alliances with other developing countries to present a united front The latest World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiation rou...

The reaction of U.S. farm groups and our trading partners to the new farm bill has been surprisingly frank and sometimes harsh. Many farm groups have given up the argument that farm subsidies are temporary measures needed until good times return. For example, Mississippi Delta cotton farmer Kenneth Hood (who is also chairman of the National Cotton Council) was recently quoted in the Wall Street...

International economic activities have helped species spread into non-native habitats, which cause significant ecological and economic burden of invaded countries. Therefore, an intuitive method to prevent exotic species from invasion is to use tariff or non-tariff trade barriers to limit trade. Nevertheless, restriction on trade has its own costs; and besides, trade barriers may not be availab...

in this paper the trade restrictiveness of agricultural policies in iran was measured by the triindex for the nine major agricultural products including wheat, rice, barely, maize, soybean,meat (beef meat), soybean oil, sugar and banana over the period 1981 to 2007. the main resultsindicate that there is no trend in above index and high volatility especially in 2006 and 2007years due to conside...

As an internationally standardized product nomenclature, the Harmonized System (HS) is used by WTO Members in their schedules of concessions and in the definitions of product coverage for a number of WTO agreements. The Harmonized System is normally amended by the World Customs Organization every four to six years. These amendments pose considerable challenges for the WTO and its Members. On th...