Draft history of ICC: final chapters
Last year, I completed the manuscript of a centennial history of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). It’s a long work: 400 pages, more or...
The Wallenbergs at the ICC
Peter Wallenberg, the scion of the great Swedish family of bankers and industrialists, died on 19 January aged 88. Among his many achievements was to ...
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...
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 nego...
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 ...
Editing Scrivener ‘Sync’ files
Do you use Scrivener? If so, and you’d like to edit your Scrivener files on another platform such as your iPad, I may have something that will help. I’ve m...
The longevity of plain TeX
Microsoft Word was first released for MS DOS in October, 1983. Some five months earlier, Donald Knuth, a professor of computing at Stanford Universi...