Is Trade Policy Democratic? And Should It Be?

One of the great clarion cries of the non-governmental world since the signing of the multilateral trade agreements of the Uruguay Round, at Marrakesh in 1994, has been that the WTO is not democratic. Allied to this is the argument that greater involvement of the NGO community in trade policy-making will enhance the democratic accountability of the WTO and will rebalance the agenda of the organisation away from a perceived bias towards corporate interests.