This book explores the paradoxes and unique characteristics of the World Economic Forum, highlighting contemporary issues and debates on global governance, economic development and corporate social responsibility. The Forum is one of the most influential, but least understood, global institutions. Its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland and its regional summits held around the world attract a significant and powerful audience from the worlds of business, economics, politics and civil society. The participants, who include business and political leaders, representatives of international institutions and civil society organizations, academia and the media, meet to debate issues of global concern and to develop possible solutions. Forum members see the organization as an innovative venue bringing together different types of stakeholders to solve global problems. To its critics, however, the Forum's public face conceals a private venue for making business deals. With clear and concise sections, including boxes containing key ideas and arguments, The World Economic Forum is a much needed introduction to an important and controversial organization and will be of considerable interest to students and practitioners of international business, international political economy, economics, development, international relations, and globalization.

This is the first book to tell the story of the diplomacy that has made the international trading system what it is today. It reveals how three major transformations over the past two centuries have shaped the way goods, services, capital and labour cross borders, as buyers and sellers meet in the global marketplace.

This book explores the paradoxes and unique characteristics of the World Economic Forum, highlighting contemporary issues and debates on global governance, economic development and corporate social responsibility. The Forum is one of the most influential, but least understood, global institutions. Its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland and its regional summits held around the world attract a significant and powerful audience from the worlds of business, economics, politics and civil society. The participants, who include business and political leaders, representatives of international institutions and civil society organizations, academia and the media, meet to debate issues of global concern and to develop possible solutions. Forum members see the organization as an innovative venue bringing together different types of stakeholders to solve global problems. To its critics, however, the Forum's public face conceals a private venue for making business deals. With clear and concise sections, including boxes containing key ideas and arguments, The World Economic Forum is a much needed introduction to an important and controversial organization and will be of considerable interest to students and practitioners of international business, international political economy, economics, development, international relations, and globalization.

Trade Diplomacy Transformed: Why Trade Matters for Global Prosperity reveals how three major transformations over the past two centuries in how and why trade diplomacy is done have shaped the essential movement of goods, services, capital and labour across borders, as buyers and sellers meet in the global marketplace. Beginning with the intimately linked origins of diplomacy and international trade in ancient history, the narrative explores the tariff negotiations that first liberalized international trade in the nineteenth century, the emergence and growth of institutions like the European Union and the World Trade Organization, and the recent rapid explosion in the diplomacy of trade dispute resolution. In its provocative conclusion, Trade Diplomacy Transformed argues that, if it is to remain effective as a venue for the globe's trade diplomacy, the WTO must reform itself to become more like the EU.

Tariffs and trade barriers are rising and major diplomatic institutions that have promoted liberal trade for decades have come under attack as impending trade wars threaten global trade and global value chains for manufacturing weaken. And at the root of this crisis, argues Geoff Pigman, is accelerating technological change. This book traces the impact of today's major technological transformations on global trade and the diplomacy that makes trade possible. Not only is global trade changing, in terms of what is traded and how, but diplomacy in the digital age is changing as well. Arguing that we must think differently about trade and diplomacy, this book proposes pragmatic policy approaches for the diplomatic management of a challenging and potentially dangerous future.