Soo Yeon Kim. 2010. Power and the governance of global trade: From the GATT to the WTO (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press)

Abstract

At a time when the Doha Round of trade negotiations goes into an agonizing 10th year, taking a fresh look at the lessons learnt from history on power and governance in the multilateral trading system (and the responsibility that goes with it) is certainly an attractive proposition. Unfortunately, Soo Yeon Kim’s inquiry into the driving forces underlying institutional developments from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to the World Trade Organization (WTO) offers few new or compelling insights into the challenges that the multilateral trading system faces at the present day. This is not to say that the book does not contain interesting pieces of information and analysis. Overall, however, its eclectic approach does not do justice to the complexities involved in the evolution of the GATT/WTO institutional context, and it is therefore ill-suited to provide a backdrop against which to analyze the constellations of power that confront the system today. The structure of the book is simple: It contains two parts consisting of two chapters each. The first part is qualitative/historical and devoted to an analysis of “Rules.” Chapter one examines the origins of the GATT in an attempt to answer the question “why global trade governance today look[s] the way it does” (p. 23). The second chapter then alleges a persistence of original power relations in the GATT or “endogeneity of power and institutional development” (p. 83). It belabors the principal supplier rule in tariff negotiations and focuses on specific flexibilities in the rules of particular interest to the larger trading powers at the time. Part two, entitled “Consequences,” contains empirical estimations of the effects of the GATT/WTO on varies categories of countries. Chapter three uses data from the inter- and post-war period to demonstrate the concentration of trade benefits from the GATT on a few major countries and the continuity of traditional trade relationships established in the context of inter-war trade blocs. Chapter four takes a long haul (jumping several decades of GATT history) to finally arrive at the WTO. Again, some quantitative analysis is offered that is claimed to demonstrate the continued existence of a