ABSTRACT
The international trading system is undergoing some potentially important changes. Negotiations in the World Trade Organization on the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) remain at an impasse and there has been a step change in preferential trade negotiations with agreements now sought between the major ‘elephants’ in the system (EU, US, and Japan). A sustainable global trading regime for the twenty-first century will rest on three pillars; reciprocal market access, rules on regulatory barriers to trade, and arrangements for integrating economies at different levels of development. The GATT was built on a US-led reciprocal market opening based on the principle of non-discrimination. The 1990s saw efforts to strengthen the rules pillar with the European Union playing a leading role, but the third pillar of differentiation remained underdeveloped. If the twenty-first century sees a continued shift in the relative economic growth towards the now-emerging and developing economies, this constitutes a significant weakness.
