Review of 'Making global trade work for people by United Nations Development Programme, Heinrich Böll Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation & Wallace Global Fund Earthscan & United Nations Development Programme.' (Pre-published version)

Abstract

This review of the multilateral trading system, the culmination of two and a half years of study undertaken by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and its co-sponsors, was published in January 2003, eight months before that system lapsed into paralysis. The report, which argues that trade liberalization must be utilized as a means of fostering human development, reads as a manifesto for the WTO Ministerial Conference which took place in Cancún, Mexico, last September. A week prior to the Cancún Conference, EU trade negotiator Pascal Lamy wrote that the WTO 'helps us move from a Hobbesian world of lawlessness, into a more Kantian world-perhaps not exactly of perpetual peace, but at least one where trade relations are subject to the rule of law'.