Law Commons^™

Regulating Antitrust Through Trade Agreements, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton

Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust law is one of the most commonly deployed instruments of economic regulation around the world. To date, over 130 countries have adopted a domestic antitrust law. These countries comprise developed and developing nations alike, and combined produce over 95 percent of the world’s GDP. Most of the countries that have adopted an antitrust law have done so since 1990. This period of significant proliferation of antitrust laws also coincides with a notable expansion of international trade agreements, including the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and the negotiation of numerous bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. These …

Trade And Poverty In The Poor Countries, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, T.N. Srinivasan

Faculty Scholarship

While freer trade, or “openness” in trade, is now widely regarded as economically benign, in the sense that it increases the size of the pie, the recent anti-globalization critics have suggested that it is socially malign on several dimensions, among them the question of poverty.

Their contention is that trade accentuates, not ameliorates, and that it deepens, not diminishes, poverty in both the rich and the poor countries. The theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of freer trade on poverty in the rich and in the poor countries is not symmetric, of course. We focus here only on the …

The World Trading System, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

The Uruguay Round is closing this week after a marathon of negotiations stretching well over seven years; so the timing of this panel is exquisite, from my viewpoint. The ceremony, besides, is in Marrakech, an exotic place that sets our minds racing with thoughts of "Casablanca," Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Indeed, one can imagine a movie being made of this historic occasion that will transform the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GAIT) into the World Trade Organization (WTO), with Peter Ustinov cast as Peter Sutherland, the brilliant and portly new director general of the GAIT who finally brought …

Surveillance Schemes: The Gatt's New Trade Policy Review Mechanism, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

In 1986 the Contracting Parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) launched the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, the most ambitious round of trade negotiations to date. The Contracting Parties to the GATT agreed in the Punta Del Este Declaration to introduce into the GATT system three new sectors for negotiation: services, trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs), and trade-related investment measures (TRIMs). In addition, for the first time in GATT history, the Contracting Parties agreed to devote a negotiating group exclusively to negotiating the tricky aspects of international trade in agricultural products. Another goal of the …

The World Trading System: Law And Policy Of International Economic Relations, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

This book serves an important need by providing a clear overview of an increasingly complex subject. The author, a leading figure in international trade law, has distilled his accumulated wisdom into an accessible account of the major features of the world trading system. His intended audience includes not only lawyers, but political scientists, economists, government officials and others as well. While he acknowledges that his own "comparative advantage" is in the legal aspects of the field (p. 6), he places the legal concepts in their political and economic context to write a treatment that will be enlightening to readers from …

More On The Equivalence Of Tariffs And Quotas, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

In an earlier paper on the equivalence of tariffs and quotas [1], I argued that this equivalence – defined such that a tariff would lead to a level of imports which, if alternatively set as a quota, would generate the same implicit tariff – followed from the assumptions of competitive domestic production, supply of imports, and holding of quotas. This universality of competitiveness sufficed to guarantee equivalence, as defined. It was further argued that a departure from these assumptions could, in general, destroy this equivalence and several such departures were analyzed: (1) perfect competition in domestic production replaced by pure …

Non-Economic Objectives And The Efficiency Properties Of Trade, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

It is well known (Kemp, 1962; Samuelson, 1962; Bhagwati, forthcoming) that, for a country with no monopoly power in trade (or domestic distortions), free trade (in the sense of a policy resulting in the equalization of domestic and foreign prices and hence excluding trade, production and consumption taxes, subsidies, and quantitative restrictions) is the optimal policy. It follows, therefore, that free trade is superior to no trade.

It has also been argued recently (Kemp, 1962), that, even in the case where there is monopoly power in trade, so that both no trade and free trade are suboptimal policies, it is …