The Shifting Landscape of Global Trade Governance: World Trade Forum

Description

Today's trade regime and its rules are under pressure. Increasing societal discontent with globalization and the rise of protectionist measures threaten the trade regime's legitimacy and effectiveness. The authors explore systemic challenges to the trade regime, inter alia, related to development, migration, inequality, the digital economy and climate change. The Shifting Landscape of Global Trade Governance allows the readers, in times of change, to put current developments into context and offers an understanding of the different dynamics defining today's regulation of the global economy. Chapters authored by leading researchers from different disciplines - law, political science and economics - address the challenges of the global economic system and share novel outlooks, both theory- and data-based, for the future.

Manfred Elsig is full Professor of International Relations and Deputy Managing Director of the World Trade Institute, Universitat Bern, Switzerland. His research focuses on international political economy, international organizations, international courts, preferential trade agreements, and European trade policy. He has published over thirty peer-reviewed articles. He is the co-editor of Governing the World Trade Organization: Past, Present and Beyond Doha (with Thomas Cottier, Cambridge, 2011) and Trade Cooperation: The Purpose, Design and Effects of Preferential Trade Agreements (with Andreas Dur, Cambridge, 2015). Michael Hahn is Managing Director of the Institute for European and International Economic Law, Universitat Bern, Switzerland and a Director at its World Trade Institute; he is an Honorary Professor at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and an Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University, Australia. Hahn researches in the areas of Swiss-EU relations, EU trade policy and WTO law. He is a co-editor of the Zeitschrift fur Europarechtliche Studien (ZEuS) and on the editorial boards of the Journal of World Trade and the New Zealand Yearbook of International Law. With Mitsuo Matsushita, Tom Schoenbaum and Petros Mavroidis he has co-authored The World Trade Organization: Law, Practice, and Policy (3rd edition, 2015). Gabriele Spilker is Associate Professor of International Politics at the Department of Political Science and Sociology of the Universitat Salzburg. Her main research interests are in the area of international political economy, international cooperation, globalization and environmental politics. Her work has been published in major peer-reviewed journals. She is the author of Globalization, Political Institutions and the Environment in Developing Countries (2013).

'The WTO is not living its best moments, and what this book does better than any other volume is to highlight the reasons why this has been the case. By highlighting the concerns that have not been addressed, the voices that have not been heard, as well as the faux pas taken by those in charge, this volume offers an unparalleled collection of well-thought papers that should find their way to the desk of every policymaker steering the world trading system these days.' Petros C. Mavroidis, Edwin B. Parker Professor of Foreign & Comparative Law, Columbia University, New York