¹ The research for this article was facilitated by the financial support of the Nuffield Foundation (Award No. SGS/00907/G). I would to like to thank a number of colleagues from the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, plus two anonymous referees, for helpful comments, criticisms and suggestions. Any errors that remain are solely my responsibility.Google Scholar

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³³ Financial Times, 14 June 2005. This prediction was later proven to be correct, at least in so far as the footwear industry was concerned. In February 2006 the Commission announced that a 20 per cent ‘anti-dumping’ import duty would be applied to leather shoes from China and Vietnam. See Financial Times, 22 February 2006.Google Scholar

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³⁷ Under Article VI of the ATC, all WTO members are permitted to use the ‘transitional safeguard mechanism’ in order to restrict imports temporarily from any source which may ‘cause serious damage, or actual threat thereof, to the domestic industry producing like and/or directly competitive products’. However, this trade sanction is limited in scope and far more difficult to invoke than either the ‘product-specific’ or the ‘textile-specific’ safeguard measures contained in China's accession agreement.Google Scholar

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⁴⁴ Indeed, one analyst has gone as far as to suggest that the EU is now the most consistent and important advocate of multilateralism, due to a marked decline in the willingness and ability of the USA to underwrite the international trading system. See S. Woolcock, ‘European Trade Policy’, in H. Wallace and W. Wallace (eds), Policy-Making in the European Union, 4th edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 273–399.Google Scholar

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⁵⁰ M. Tempest, ‘EU Reach “Breakthrough” on Aid Budget’, Guardian, 24 May 2005. It is worth adding in parentheses that quite a few European countries have already gone beyond this aim to meet – and in some cases exceed – the UN target of 0.7 per cent that was established in 1970: Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark reached this figure in the 1970s, Luxembourg in 2000, while other member states, including the UK, France, Belgium, Finland and Spain, have pledged to meet it by 2015. By way of contrast, the USA currently spends approximately 0.16 per cent of GNI on development assistance, Japan 0.19 per cent, while the overall OECD average stands at 0.25 per cent. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), ‘Official Development Assistance Increases Further – But 2006 Targets Still a Challenge’, press release, available at: http://www.oecd.org/document/3/0,2340,en_2649_34447_34700611_1_1_1_1,00.html.Google Scholar

⁵¹ The EU's preferential trading system is not without its critics. Paul Brenton, for example, has drawn attention to the very stringent ‘rules of origin’ attached to the trade agreements that have the perverse effect of actually discouraging eligible developing countries from taking up preferences in the first place. Likewise, the Lomé Convention and the Cotonou Agreement have been criticized for targeting aid for the most part at developing countries with strong colonial links to Europe at the expense of other, equally poor, states that do not have this historical connection. See, respectively, P. Brenton, ‘Integrating the Least Developed Countries into the World Trading System: The Current Impact of EU Preferences under Everything But Arms’, World Bank Policy Research Paper, No. 3018, 2003; and Holland, The European Union and the Third World.Google Scholar

⁵² Ibid.Google Scholar

⁵³ P. Mandelson, ‘Rich Nations Must Do More to Help the Poor’, Independent, 27 December 2004.Google Scholar

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