WTO Law and Developing Countries

Description

Developing countries make up the majority of the membership of the World Trade Organization. Many developing countries believe that the welfare gains that were supposed to ensue from the establishment of the WTO and the results of the Uruguay Round remain largely unachieved. Coming on the heels of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the ongoing Doha Development Round, launched in that Middle Eastern city in the fall of 2001, is now on 'life support'. It was inaugurated with much fanfare as a means of addressing the difficulties faced by developing countries within the multilateral trading system. Special and differential treatment provisions in the WTO agreement in particular are the focus of much discussion in the ongoing round, and voices for change are multiplying because of widespread dissatisfaction with the effectiveness, enforceability, and implementation of those special treatment provisions.

George Bermann is the Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Law (a chair conferred by the Commission of the European Communities), as well as the Walter Gellhorn Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He has been a member of the Columbia Law School faculty since 1975, teaching a range of subjects: initially heavily domestic, but for many years entirely comparative, international, and transnational. Professor Bermann is also a member of the teaching faculty of the College 'Europe in Bruges, Belgium, and also regularly gives courses at the Universities of Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne) and Paris II (Pantheon-Assas), as well as the Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris for its DESS en Droit de la Globalisation. More recently, Professor Bermann undertook a Tocqueville-Fulbright Distinguished Professorship at the University of Paris from June to December 2006. Dr Bermann is the President of the International Academy of Comparative Law, the former President of the American Society of Comparative Law, and a member of the American Law Institute. Petros C. Mavroidis serves as Professor of Law at the University of Neuchatel and is Chair of the European Community and International Economic Law there, and is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Foreign and Comparative Law at Columbia Law School. He specializes in the Law and the WTO and serves as the Legal Advisor to the World Trade Organization in the Technical Cooperation Division where he assists developing countries in WTO dispute settlement proceedings. He is also the Chief Co-Reporter of the American Law Institute project 'Principles of International Trade: the WTO', now in its third year, and a member of the board of the Council of the World Trade Law Association.

Review of the hardback: 'WTO Law and Developing Countries represent[s] [an] important contribution on the path to understanding what lies ahead.' Leiden Journal of International Law