China's World Trade Organization (WTO) membership negotiations take place on 2 tracks -- bilateral & multilateral negotiations. The bilateral negotiations, including those between China & the U.S., are designed to obtain China's commitment to remove market access barriers & open China's domestic market to more foreign goods & services. The focus of the multilateral negotiations between China & 44 members is to ensure that China will conform its trade to the rules, practices, & obligations required by the WTO agreement. This report examines: the results of the Nov. 1999 bilateral Agreement on Market Access between China & the U.S., & the status of China's ongoing multilateral negotiations in the WTO.

This book examines the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the context of the global economy in the twenty-first century, arguing that many problems within the institution lie in the disparity between its design and the nature of its tasks. Studying the global trade regime and the unsuccessful Doha round of trade liberalization negotiations, this volume suggests that important institutional adjustments may be necessary for the WTO and other major international institutions to (re-)gain their ability to manage global economy. It uses extensive new qualitative and quantitative evidence to identify systematic dysfunctions in how the Doha negotiations have been conducted and links these dysfunctions to the exclusively inter-governmental design of interest representation in the WTO. Based on this, the book argues that global economic institutions should consider allowing broader parliamentary and non-state representation of their members. Presenting findings which can also be applied to other global economic institutions, Negotiations in the World Trade Organization will be useful to students and scholars of international trade, global governance and international political economy.

The editors have succeeded in bringing together an excellent mix of leading scholars and practitioners. No book on the WTO has had this wide a scope before or covered the legal framework, economic and political issues, current and would-be countries and a outlook to the future like these three volumes do. 3000 pages, 80 chapters in 3 volumes cover a very interdiscplinary field that touches upon law, economics and politics.

A blow-by-blow account of the highly political and, often contentious negotiations around the TRIPS Waiver proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) between October 2020 and June 2022. For more than two years developing countries have fought against the inequities in the access to medical products, to address the pandemic COVID-19. As many as 100 countries, led by South Africa and India, sought to challenge the existing rules that protect intellectual property, to boost manufacturing capacities for medical products during COVID-19. This they did at the WTO in Geneva, by seeking to temporarily suspend certain provisions of the Agreement om Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) - legal rules that govern intellectual property matters. It is a battle these countries lost in June 2022, after first bringing this bold proposal to the WTO in October 2020 that directly sought to challenge the monopolies of big pharmaceutical companies on medical products. Many developed countries are home to the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. What was finally agreed upon is a narrow set of clarifications of existing rules applicable to the production of vaccines, in sharp contrast to the paradigmatic shift that the proponents of the waiver proposal had originally sought. After an estimated 15 million deaths associated with COVID-19, when billions of people globally continue to remain unvaccinated because of the lack of timely access to medical products, the fight is now moving on to ensure that the access to medicines and tests, goes beyond vaccines. The first edition of this book is a compilation of 50 stories published in Geneva Health Files - an investigative newsletter on global health - that tracked these negotiations over the last two years.