Category Archives: Critical mass

Can multilateralism be revived?

Shawn Don­nan at the FT says that it needs a health­i­er life-style. Mul­ti­lat­er­al­ism is weak­er than it has ever been. But, in trade, it has nev­er been as robust as it seemed on the sur­face. For now, I doubt there is a rea­son­able prospect it can be revived in its orig­i­nal form. Instead, we should […]

November 17, 2014 – 9:49 am | By pwg | Posted in Critical mass, Policy, Trade | Comments (0)

Is a plurilateral the ‘way out’ for WTO on agriculture?

Q: under what cir­cum­stances would a crit­i­­cal-mass (CM) pluri­lat­er­al agree­ment on agri­cul­ture be a way “out of the mess” in the WTO agri­cul­ture nego­ti­a­tions? A: any CM pluri­lat­er­al works as a “way out” of the WTO stale­mate where it offers a degree of ben­e­fits to the mem­bers of the pluri­lat­er­al agree­ment such that they were […]

October 2, 2014 – 7:42 am | By pwg | Posted in Critical mass, Governance, Public policy, Trade | Comments (0)

Evaluation of a “Critical Mass” agreement on agriculture

The stale­mate in Gene­va on the Decem­ber 2013 Bali Agree­ment con­cern­ing both Trade Facil­i­a­tion and agri­cul­ture sub­si­dies has revived some inter­est in the poten­tial for a pluri­lat­er­al agree­ment on Agri­cul­ture among WTO mem­bers. I attach to this brief post a pre-print of the sum­ma­ry that Andy Stol­er and I wrote for the jour­nal Glob­al Gov­er­nance […]

October 1, 2014 – 9:55 pm | By pwg | Posted in Critical mass, Foreign policy, Ideas, Trade | Comments (1)