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Free Lunches? Wto As Public Good, And The Wto's View Of Public Goods, Petros C. Mavroidis
Free Lunches? Wto As Public Good, And The Wto's View Of Public Goods, Petros C. Mavroidis
Faculty Scholarship
The WTO can be viewed as a public good in that it provides a forum for negotiations which also produces the necessary legal framework to act as a support for agreed liberalization. To avoid any misunderstandings, in this article the discussion focuses on the WTO as a forum and a set of agreements, not on free trade. Since the legal agreements coming under its aegis are for good reasons incomplete, the WTO provides an additional public good by ‘completing’ the original contract through case law. The importance of this feature increases over time as tariffs are driven towards irrelevance. In …
The Genesis Of The Gats (General Agreement On Trade In Services), Juan A. Marchetti, Petros C. Mavroidis
The Genesis Of The Gats (General Agreement On Trade In Services), Juan A. Marchetti, Petros C. Mavroidis
Faculty Scholarship
The Uruguay Round services negotiations saw the light of day amidst pressures from lobbies in developed countries, unilateral retaliatory actions, and ideological struggle in the developing world. The final outcome, the GATS, certainly characterized by a complex structure and awkward drafting here and there, is not optimal but is an important first step towards the liberalization of trade in services. This article traces the GATS negotiating history, from its very beginning in the late 1970s, paying particular attention to the main forces that brought the services dossier to the multilateral trading system (governments, industries, and academics), and the interaction between …