Multilateral Trade Negotiations and the Changing Prospects for Third World Development: Assessing from a Southern Perspective

Abstract

It has been three years since the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the implementation, subject to differentiated phase-in periods for different areas, of the agreements reached in the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiation (MTN). latter is, of course, the eighth in a series of MTN that were held under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in the last half century, during which the international trade and investment environment for Third World development (especially the trade aspect) has been periodically recast and altered. Given the ongoing pace of globalization and the persistence of underdevelopment in many parts of the Third World, it is timely to review how the trade and investment environment has evolved and, based on that review, to consider the prospects for development in the foreseeable future. conclusions drawn from such an exercise depend on initial assumptions as to how trade and foreign investment are related to the process of development. The [mainstream] theory of trade and welfare provides the underpinnings for the general principles that underlie GATT . [Bhagwati 1987, 551-2]. Hence, MTNs held under the auspices of GATT have been judged largely according to how closely the results of the negotiations conform to the prescriptions of that theory [see Baldwin 1995, 153; OECD 1993, chaps. 2-3]. To strive for better balanced judgments, there