This book is based on the premise that Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) in the Asia-Pacific significantly impact on the material progress of the peoples of this region. These impacts - in terms of the benefits and costs associated with RTAs - will vary greatly from country to country. The internationally acclaimed contributors examine the theoretical perspective of RTAs in relation to exchange rates, the role and goals of the WTO and agriculture. The tensions and trade frictions resulting from the formation of trade blocs and their conflicts with the roles and goals of the WTO are also examined in the book. Those economies that are considered the economic powerhouses of the region including China, Japan, South Korea, major ASEAN countries and Australia are discussed in depth. The findings of the book suggest that RTAs are becoming increasingly popular in the Asia-Pacific region. However the associated costs and benefits depend on a number of complex factors including exchange rates, negotiation skills, the sectors included or excluded from the RTA, and the level of economic development of the nations signing the RTAs. The book will be particularly useful to academics, researchers, consultants, students, policy makers (including trade negotiators), and practitioners involved in trade and development in the Asia-Pacific region.

This volume collects 21 papers on the following topics: non-discrimination in the multilateral trading system; preferential trade agreements and multilateral trade liberalization; sustaining international tariff cooperation; and case-studies of WTO disputes.

The Handbook on International Trade Policy is an insightful and comprehensive reference tool focusing on trade policy issues in the era of globalization. Each specially commissioned chapter deals with important international trade issues, discusses the current literature on the subject, and explores major controversies. The Handbook also directs the interested reader to further sources of information. The expert contributors cover both traditional and more current concerns including: * history of thought on trade policy * the development of multilateral organizations such as the World Trade Organization * border restrictions and subsidies * regional trade agreements * trade and the environment * animal, plant and food safety measures * international protection of intellectual property and sanctions. Presenting a broad and state-of-the-art perspective on the topic, this highly accessible Handbook will prove an invaluable resource to researchers, academics, policymakers and practitioners concerned with international trade policy.

In their negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, Philippine chief negotiators attempt to build coalitions to implement reform. Deference and "External-Internal" sequencing tactics are quite common, but the theoretical literature has not examined the conditions under which they are effective or marginalized. This study uses a "Within-Case Study Method of Causal Inference" to examine twenty-four observations from the years 1984-1994 that examine the interaction of the Philippine chief economic negotiators with the IMF, the Chief of Governments, international and domestic, and cabinet and societal veto players on the issues of petroleum price and import reforms. Through this approach, the study rules out alternative deductive system level theories to explain economic outcomes; refines the two-level game framework, generates a midrange typology on the pattern of successes and failures of the negotiations, and provides recommendations on manipulable variables for policy makers. The study suggests that these tactics are constrained by the leverage and signal provided by international veto players and the interaction between formal and informal domestic institutions.

The men and women in Invisible Hands reveal the human rights abuses occurring behind the scenes of the global economy. These narrators - including phone manufacturers in China, copper miners in Zambia, garment workers in Bangladesh, and farmers around the world - reveal the secret history of the things we buy, including lives and communities devastated by low wages, environmental degradation, and political repression. Sweeping in scope and rich in detail, these stories capture the interconnectivity of all people struggling to support themselves and their families. Narrators include Kalpona, a leading Bangladeshi labor organizer who led her first strike at 15; Han, who, as a teenager, began assembling circuit boards for an international electronics company based in Seoul; Albert, a copper miner in Zambia who, during a wage protest, was shot by representatives of the Chinese-owned mining company that he worked for; and Sanjay, who grew up in the shadow of the Bhopal chemical disaster, one of the worst industrial accidents in history.

In this book, originally published in 1937, Jacob Viner traces, in a series of studies of contemporary source-material, the evolution of the modern orthodox theory of international trade from its beginnings in the revolt against English mercantilism in the 17th and 18th centuries, through the English currency and tariff controversies of the 19th century, to the late 20th century. The author offers a detailed examination of controversies in the technical literature centering on important propositions of the classical and neo-classical economists relating to the theory of the mechanism of international trade and the theory of gain from trade.

In much of the world's economy, production, exchange and consumption are regulated by the Market, which is widely believed to be based on economic rationality and driven by a desire to consume. But there are different views of how the Market operates, or ought to operate. This collection of essays discusses a series of alternative perspectives - manifested in ethical movements, alternative consumer behaviour, and social corporate responsibility initiatives - that seek to reveal the 'hidden hands' of power, inequality and morality that shape Market exchange. Against the impersonality of the Market, we find initiatives, such as local food movements, that seek to re-embed commodity exchange in social relationships. Against the idea of the open economy, we find initiatives that seek to counter the ever-widening gap between producers and consumers. Against increased extraction from less powerful economic actors, we find ethical movements, such as Fair Trade, that work to return a fair share of the price to producers and workers. And, against the unfettered Market, we encounter a move to re-regulate trade and protect those located in the most vulnerable market positions. The volume engages with a range of alternative ethical perspectives and the initiatives to which they give rise. Twelve essays - all based on first-hand ethnographic studies of alternative trade movements, corporate social initiatives and consumer behaviour - provide the groundwork for wide-ranging theoretical engagement and comparative analysis. The case studies cover a range of places, commodities and initiatives, including Fair Trade and organic production activism in Hungary, CSR discourses in South Africa and Europe, Fair Trade coffee in Costa Rica and handicrafts made in Indonesia. The essays contribute to a series of current debates within the social sciences about what drives alternative Market engagements, how they are understood and represented by different actors, and what makes their outcomes often ambivalent or contradictory. They address disjunctions between discourses and practices, and internal inconsistencies within ethical movements and corporate initiatives. The volume as a whole engages with questions about morality and the economy, the creation and circulation of value, and, ultimately, the possibility of making alternatives work. In doing so, the contributors reveal the many fields of power at work within the Market as well as within the movements advocating more ethical economic relationships. The volume will be of particular interest to social scientists, business and management studies scholars, and a range of practitioners.

This two volume set reprints 37 important contributions dealing with international trade throughout the world during the rise of Great Britain to world dominance, the industrialization of Western Europe, and the political and economic expansion of European powers into Asia, Africa and the Americas.The period from 1700 to 1850 saw many dramatic changes in the world economy. Frequent war among the European nations also affected these changes, influencing the timing and perhaps the ultimate magnitude of intercontinental trade. In addition to discussions of commodity trade in different parts of the world, essays in these volumes deal with the effects of governmental policies towards the flows of capital and labour and the emergence of trading institutions and their impacts on economic development. Many deal with controversial topics such as the role of slavery and the slave trade on European development, the burdens of mercantilism, and the impact of European expansion on the economies of the less developed parts of the world.

This handbook provides a unique opportunity to bring together several different strings of debates, especially useful to the growing focus on responsibility which increasingly demands interdisciplinary approaches. It focuses on practices and normativity in ways that are often overlooked by a focus on accountability. It highlights the contested meaning of responsibility. In addition to its academic purpose, it may also prove of interest to policy-makers, think tanks, policy research institutes.

This volume is a unique study on the highly controversial issue of standard of review in WTO dispute resolution. Standards of review reflect the extent to which the WTO adjudication bodies can over-ride the decisions taken by national authorities. As such they play a crucial role in shaping the balance of power and responsibility for decisions on factual and legal issues. In recent years they have gained unprecedented political and systemic significance in WTO panel proceedings.
To what extent should panels and the Appellate Body review policy determinations of national or regional authorities of WTO members, both in terms of facts and law? Should they be guided by a policy of judicial restraint or should they review domestic measures de novo? This volume first addresses the tense relationship between international interdependence and national sovereignty against which WTO dispute settlement takes place. It then examines the notion of standards of review as one of the crucial elements in shaping the balance of power and responsibility for decisions on factual and legal issues. The current state of law and practice which has emerged through panel and Appellate Body reports is analysed and critically assessed in a commentary on the evolution of, and inconsistencies amongst, the relevant cases.
Standards of Review in WTO Dispute Resolution is a significant contribution to a perplexing subject. It also contributes to the clarification of basic issues of global Constitutionalism and the interface between domestic and international law.

Originally published in 1996. This study looks at the impact of exchange rate fluctuation on the pricing practices of foreign industries that import into the United States market. It presents several studies of the pass-through behaviour of over 100 disaggregated commodity groups with bi-lateral exchange rates. The book presents analysis of specific competitors and their individual pricing responses to exchange rate changes, adding significantly to pricing theory as well as being useful for marketers in predicting business responses.

The book explores the macroeconomic and sectoral employment implications (in agriculture, industry and services) of China's World Trade Organisation accession. It argues that while short-run employment losses may occur, in the longer term China will be able to generate additional employment particularly in the tertiary sectors; and that it can maintain its comparative advantage in labour-intensive exports by relocating production from high-cost coastal areas to the hinterland with abundant supply of cheap labour. It also argues that, although China is likely to benefit in the long run, in the short and medium term China is likely to face enormous problems, including increased unemployment as weaker links cease to be protected by tariffs, and the problem of restructuring state-owned enterprises.

In an ever more globalized and pluralized world, more attention is paid to engaging private parties in the process of trade policy-making, as non-state actors are often directly affected by trade policy shaped by governments. However, despite growing interest in this issue, there has been a relative lack of academic research on public-private relationships in trade policy-making under any kind of framework.The book, Public-Private Relationships in Trade Policy-making, proposes an analytical framework to examine various levels of public engagement, both in the international and national arena. By analyzing the WTO at the international level, and the US, EU, and Korea at the national level based on the author's proposed framework, this book goes beyond a mere descriptive approach to public engagement in trade policy-making to offer meaningful implications for policymakers in developing countries, which are increasingly acknowledging the importance of public-private relationships in the field of trade.

The concept of 'good governance' is of increasing importance, and is used by international organizations to ensure reasonable conformity to high standards in states which participate in the global trading regime and other international activities. This book examines the concept of good governance and how it is applied in the states of the Gulf Co-operation Council. These states are particularly important because of their strategic location and massive oil wealth. Moreover, as monarchies, in most cases without powerful democratic representative bodies, and as Islamic countries, with a different outlook from countries of the West, Western standards of good governance may need to be modified in order for them to be implemented effectively.

How do international negotiations affect domestic politics? Starting in the 1990s, countries throughout Latin America embarked on many and simultaneous negotiations. On the shifting ground of widening and deepening trade agendas and diverse arenas, what factors determined trade politics? This book examines the domestic political dynamics triggered by South-South, North-South and multilateral agendas in Argentina and Chile between 1990 and 2005. Using a much-needed cross-negotiation and cross-country comparative perspectives, and through detailed empirical analyses of several key negotiations, it proposes an explanation that emphasizes the interplay between international negotiations and domestic trade politics, taken as the result of the complex and dynamic interdependencies and interrelations between state and society. Informed by interviews with public officials, businesses and civil society, the analysis reveals that variation in the depth of agendas, the distributional effects and the uncertainty of political outcomes all have important consequences for domestic preference formation, collective action strategies and types of relationships. Given this, the variety of negotiations, when considered separately and comparatively, show that South-South, North-South and multilateral processes promote different patterns of trade politics. In sum, although national specificities and historical legacies are important, the book argues that trade policy comes first in creating domestic politics in Latin America.

The European Union (EU) is at the forefront of engaging in external trade relations outside of the World Trade Organization (WTO) with entire regions and economic powerhouses. Understanding why and how the EU engages in one of the most active fields of external relations is crucial. This book fills a gap in the literature by analysing motives on the modes - bilateralism, inter-regionalism, or multilateralism - of EU external trade relations towards regional organizations in Asia and Latin America outside of the WTO. In particular, it examines why the EU turned from interregional to bilateral external trade relations towards these world regions - a question that is, to date, under-researched. By developing and testing an original approach rooted in realist theorizing coined 'commercial realism', it examines systematically the explanatory power of commercial realism against liberal-institutionalist approaches dominant in the literature on EU external relations through five in-depth case studies. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in EU Politics/Studies, EU external relations, inter-regionalism and more broadly to International Relations and International Political Economy.

Extending the frontiers of commodity chain research, this distinctive volume includes original work from major figures in sociology, history, geography, and labor studies. It underscores the wide and interdisciplinary appeal of chain approaches for analyzing the economic, social, and political dimensions of international trade and production networks.
Commodity chain analysis sheds light on the political and ecological implications of economic globalization and on how activists in pursuit of social justice, workers' rights, and environmental protection can use it. Following a substantive review of literature in the field, the collection goes on to examine theoretical and methodological debates over how to conduct research on global commodity and value chains, how power is exercised through these chains, and how global economic activities are coordinated across space. The result is a rich and unusually coherent volume that demonstrates how commodity and value chain analysis is informing contemporary research in a variety of fields.

In quantity and importance, private standards are rapidly taking over the role of public norms in the international and national regulation of product safety. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the rise, role and status of these private product safety standards in the legal regulation of integrating markets. In international and regional trade law as in European and American constitutional and administrative law, tort law and antitrust law, the book analyses the ways in which legal systems can and do recognise private norms as 'law.' This sociological question of law's recognition of private governance is indissolubly connected with a normative question of democratic theory: can law recognize legal validity and democratic legitimacy outside the constitution, without constitutional political institutions and beyond the nation state? Or: can law 'constitute' private transnational governance? The book offers the first systematic treatment of European, American and international 'standards law' in the English language, and makes a significant contribution to the study of the processes of globalization and privatization in social and legal theory. For the thesis on which this book was based Harm Schepel was awarded the first EUI Alumni Prize for the "best interdisciplinary and/or comparative thesis on European issues" written at the EUI in recent years.

'Powerful' - Silvia Federici It's in our food, our cosmetics, our fuel and our bodies. Palm oil, found in half of supermarket products, has shaped our world. Max Haiven uncovers how the gears of capitalism are literally and metaphorically lubricated by this ubiquitous elixir. From its origins in West Africa to today's Southeast Asian palm oil superpowers, Haiven's sweeping, experimental narrative takes us on a global journey that includes looted treasures, the American system of mass incarceration, the history of modern art and the industrialisation of war. Beyond simply calling for more consumer boycotts, he argues for recognising in palm oil humanity's profound potential to shape our world beyond racial capitalism and neo-colonial dispossession. One part history, one part dream, one part theory, one part montage, this kaleidoscopic and urgent book asks us to recognise the past in the present and to seize the power to make a better world.

Fair trade is a fast-growing alternative market intended to bring better prices and greater social justice to small farmers around the world. But is it working? This vivid study of coffee farmers in Mexico offers the first thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of fair trade. Based on extensive research in Zapotec indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, Brewing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair trade market. The book compares these families to conventional farming families in the same region, who depend on local middlemen and who are vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world coffee market. Written in a clear and accessible style and updated with an added chapter and a new conclusion, the book carries readers into the lives of these coffee-producer households and their communities, offering a nuanced analysis of both the effects of fair trade on everyday life and the limits of its impact. Brewing Justice paints a clear picture of the complex dynamics of the fair trade market and its relationship to the global economy. Drawing on interviews with dozens of fair trade leaders, the book also explores the changing politics of this international movement, including the challenges posed by the entry of transnational corporations into the fair trade system. It concludes by offering recommendations for strengthening and protecting the integrity of fair trade.

First published in 1903, this collects together speeches given by H.H. Asquith to refute the charge that those who defended Free Trade at the turn of the century were ignorant or indifferent to actual and potential economic forces, and also clung to obsolete conceptions of the Empire. The author intends to vindicate Britain's contemporaneous fiscal system, not as academic dogma, but as a concrete and living financial policy. In pursuit of this he undertakes to expose what he argues are the "blunders of fact and logic" of the new protectionist campaign, illustrated with extracts from the speeches of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Austen Chamberlain - whose advocacy of protectionism provides the focus for the collected speeches.

Mshomba provides a systematic study of Africa as it relates to the World Trade Organization. He examines the WTO's enforcement mechanism; the WTO's broadened mandate, illustrated by the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights; agriculture in the Doha Round; issues relating to transparency in government procurement; and the endeavor to streamline assistance to developing countries through an 'Aid for Trade' initiative. The author integrates theory and practice, with a clear presentation of important economic concepts. He provides a rigorous analysis of key issues and proposals. He presents African countries as having an important role to play in the WTO, especially as they actively engage in bargaining through various coalitions. Mshomba acknowledges that WTO negotiations will always be complex and at times contentious due to wide economic and political differences between countries. He views the differences, however, as creating opportunities for a mutually beneficial exchange of goods, services and ideas.

Regulatory Counter-Terrorism explores an emerging terrain in which the global governance of terrorism is expanding. This terrain is that of proactive regulatory governance - the management of the day-to-day activities of individuals and entities in order to pre-emptively minimize vulnerability to terrorism. Overshadowed by the more publicized dimensions of military and criminal justice responses to terrorism, regulatory counter-terrorism has grown in size and impact without stirring up as much academic debate. Through a critical assessment of international regulatory counter-terrorism in three areas - financial services, the control of arms and dangerous materials, and the cross-border movement of persons and goods - this volume identifies a dynamic trend. This is the refashioning of international rule making into a flexible and experimental exercise. This volume shows how this transformation is affecting societies across the world in new ways and in the process unravelling settled understandings of international law. Furthermore, through an in-depth analysis of the working processes of UN counter-terrorism bodies and the Financial Action Task Force, this book illustrates that the monitoring of the global counter-terrorism regime is, contrary to accepted understanding, in the main collaborative and managerial, and coercive only peripherally. Dynamic rule making and soft monitoring complement each other, but this is a reason for concern: the softening of international monitoring encourages regulatory adventurism by states in tackling terrorism, while the element of self-correction in dynamic rule making helps silence the calls for institutionalized mechanisms of accountability. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of counter-terrorism, security studies, global governance, and international law.

World-renowned economist Ronald W. Jones gets to the essence of international trade theory in this collection of articles that span over half a century of his published work. As the global economy has grown, so too has the need for a deeper rooted understanding of trade - and its assorted benefits. With clear, simplifying prose, Jones elucidates the Ricardian, Heckscher-Ohlin, and Specific-Factors models of general equilibrium theory. Jones' pioneering work anticipates, among other changes in our time, the creation of far-flung supply chains brought about by the falling costs of service links. The theoretical, technical, and historical insights in the text are peppered with personal notes that capture modern intellectual development in the field, providing a bedrock foundation in international trade for students and practitioners alike.

The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of international economic law as a major force in the international legal system. This force has been severely tested by the economic crisis of 2008. Unable to prevent the crisis, the existing legal mechanisms have struggled to react against its direst consequences. This book brings together leading experts to analyse the main causes of the crisis and the role that international economic law has played in trying to prevent it, on the one hand, and worsening it, on the other. The work highlights the reaction and examines the tools that have been created by the international legal field to implement international cooperation in an effort to help put an end to the crisis and avoid similar events in the future. The volume brings together eminent legal academics and economists to examine key issues from the perspectives of trade law, financial law, and investment law with the collective aim of reform of international economic governance.