ABSTRACT
The establishment of the WTO on 1 January 1995 marks, in many ways, a new era in international trade regulation. It symbolises the successful completion of a protracted and periodically fraught Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations (MTNs) – a round that seemed to many destined to failure (see, for instance, Finger, 1991). It also represents the completion of a significant step towards the creation of a coherent system of global economic governance, centred around the WTO and acting in concert with its older siblings, the IMF and the World Bank, as well as with a host of like-minded global and regional bodies.
