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International criminal tribunals are in trouble. Lines are blurring between international legal systems. It's increasingly difficult to balance the benefits of open trade with the negative impact of its volatility. Rhetoric around border and migration control is vociferous. At the American Society of International Law's annual meeting (30 March – 2 April 2016), academics and practitioners will address the theme 'Charting New Frontiers in International Law'.

The post Addressing new frontiers in international law appeared first on OUPblog.

Kent Jones is Professor of Economics at Babson College and the author of The Doha Blues: Institutional Crisis and Reform in the WTO.  The book highlights the real stumbling blocks to trade liberalization and highlights the way around them, in light of the collapse of the Doha Round.  Jones outlines the practical steps that must be taken before the World Trade Organization can achieve accord.  In the excerpt below, Jones begins to outline the problems the Doha negotiations have faced.

Why have the Doha negotiations been so painfully slow and unsuccessful so far?  A review of recent commentary and analysis seems to indicate that the difficulty has many roots, as shown by the following list of contributing factors:

1. -Multilateral trade negotiations have become too unwieldy to manage effectively. Membership in the GATT grew dramatically from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the WTO as of 2009 had 153 members, a large number to manage in a consensus-based decision process. In addition, the number of issues has grown with the expanded scope of the WTo coverage into agriculture, services, and “behind-the-border” trade issues.
2. -The single undertaking was a good idea in principle, but it doesn’t work in practice.  In order to provide the widest possible scope of trade-offs that would provide each member with a stake in the negotiating outcome, and to avoid the fragmentation of the GATT system of codes, the WTO was founded on the principle that “there is no agreement until everything is agreed.”  In conjunction with the unwieldy scope of membership and agenda issues indicated in the first item above, some argue that forcing the negotiating outcome into a single, balanced package for all members is virtually unachievable.
3. -The balance of power in trade negotiations has shifted in favor of large developing countries.  The United States and the European Union had dominated trade negotiations for many years, and while they remain the world’s leading traders (both in imports and exports), their relative importance in trade has diminished, and many faster-growing developing countries, such as India, Brazil, and China, are now asserting greater influence over the WTO negotiating process.
4. -The Doha Development Round was oversold as a trade negotiation to promote development. Leading developed countries agreed to present the Doha negotiations as a “development” round in order to provide developing countries with a strong incentive to participate.  Yet the WTO is not a development agency, even if it plays an important part in development.  It was impossible for the Doha Round to fulfill the expectations of a trade round presumably focused on development goals.
5. -Developing countries are “mad as hell” and won’t take it anymore.  In conjunction with the previous item, many developing countries were disappointed in the outcome of the Uruguay Round, in which they expected large gains from liberalization of textile and clothing trade in exchange for commitments on the protection of developed countries’ intellectual property and on other “behind the border issues.”  The delayed textile/clothing trade liberalization, in which China won the lion’s share of gains, combined with the potentially large costs of intellectual property protection and the financial cost of
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