Strengthening the World Trade Organization – Critical Demands for Imperative Success: Identifying Politically Viable Options for Incremental Reform

Basedow, Robert (2018) Strengthening the World Trade Organization – Critical Demands for Imperative Success: Identifying Politically Viable Options for Incremental Reform. UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

The multilateral trade regime and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are a major success story of global governance. In few other domains have states managed to cooperate as successfully in the last 70 years as in global trade affairs. Since the 1990s, the multilateral trade regime – with the WTO at its centre – nonetheless goes through a crisis. The crisis culminated in 2016 with the collapse of the Doha Round. The crisis puts into question the WTO’s ability to effectively and efficiently govern global trade. Stakeholders, moreover, increasingly challenge the legitimacy and accountability of the WTO. The main purpose of the study is to review E15 work to identify weaknesses in the WTO’s institutional setup and related reform proposals. As institutional aspects received comparatively little attention, the study draws also on other academic and policy publications to complement E15 work. The underlying rationale is that the current crisis has various – including institutional – causes. An institutional reform may thus contribute to overcoming the WTO’s current problems. The political climate does not allow for wholesale amendments to the WTO Agreement. The study therefore focuses on incremental reform proposals rather than grand and ideal-type solutions. The study focuses on three main challenges and reform areas.

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