This Essay is an attempt to go back to some of the principles and factors which lay behind the launching of the Uruguay Round and the package which resulted, to look at some of the current unease about the WTO, and to see where the institution may need to go to reassert its role to command fully public and political confidence once again. CONCLUDING THE URUGUAY ROUNDCREATING THE NEW ARCHITECTUR...

During September 10-14, 2003, WTO members met in Cancún for a mid-term review of the Doha Round of trade negotiations, launched in November 2001. Trade ministers entered the 5 WTO Ministerial divided on agricultural and non-agricultural negotiating modalities, on whether to launch negotiations on the so-called Singapore issues and their possible scope, on the approach to take towards strengthen...

T agreement to create a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) was one of the major innovations to emerge from the Uruguay round. Trade in services was not covered by the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), even though such trade had always accounted for a non-trivial share of the foreign exchange earnings (expenditures) of many countries. The best estimates available sug...

A further round of negotiations on agricultural trade liberalisation began in the WTO in March 2000. This paper discusses the interests of developing countries in these negotiations. Compared to the developed countries, developing countries have relatively few ‘rights’ to agricultural support under the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and thus have an interest in pressing for a significan...

T HE main goal of international trade liberalisation is to establish a trading environment in which all firms compete on an equal footing. This includes a concern that all firms should pay the full costs of the inputs that are used in the production process. Where the production generates external costs, the Polluter Pays Principle has been widely accepted as indicating that the firm should bea...

Biographical notes: Jayashree Watal is a Fellow of the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Research, New Delhi, and Visiting Fellow of the Institute for International Economics, Washington DC. She was Director, Trade Policy Division, Ministry of Commerce, New Delhi. Watal was responsible for TRIPS negotiations in the Uruguay Round from 1989-91. She has recently completed a com...

Arvind Subramanian has been a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since April 2007. He also holds a joint appointment at the Center for Global Development and is a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. He served at the International Monetary Fund from 1992 to 2007, most recently as assistant director in the research department (2004–07). He worked at...

This paper is about assessments of the Uruguay Round (UR), and lessons from these for the assessment of the next. The paper offers an overview of the CGE models employed or referenced by international organizations at the close of the UR. This is followed by a summary of the results of those models. These results are compared with actual experience since UR implementation began. Some conclusion...