If economic development is essentially about an economy’s transition from agricultural to industrial production, then the attainment of a comparative advantage in industrial products is widely regarded to be the hallmark of successful development.  Against this backdrop, governments aiming to promote development often seek to do so partly through the promotion of industrial exports.  In […]

According to “An Economic Theory of the GATT” by Bagwell and Staiger (1999), the main purpose of a trade agreement is to escape from a terms-of-trade driven prisoner’s dilemma. This is where all countries have a collective incentive to liberalise trade but an individual incentive to adopt protectionist measures such as tariffs. Recent econometric evidence […]

The Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement is an undertaking by members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to respect each others’ property rights.  At its inception, its main purpose was to protect the intellectual property rights (IPRs) of Northern firms, who have historically tended to be the main innovators, in Southern markets […]

Ever since the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994, there has been a growing sense that the GATT, and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that has superseded it, favours the interests of developed countries.  In response to this, a line of research has developed to […]

The stated mission of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that preceded it is ‘to open trade for the benefit of all’.  Rose (2004) questions whether the GATT/WTO is actually accomplishing its mission by showing that, surprisingly, member countries’ trade patterns are little different from those of […]