The GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) is a highly complicated legal instrument and prone to various interpretations because of the embedded ambiguity. It should not come as a surprise that in the context of all disputes concerning services, WTO panels and the Appellate Body reached diametrically opposite conclusions on the same issues. Un-appealed panel reports, on the other hand, have not been welcome either. One of the major, if not the major, issue is the legal relationship between Arts. XVI and XVII GATS, which regulate market access. The manner in which this relationship has been interpreted inescapably leads to constructing the GATS as a move beyond negative integration. This is at odds with the intent of the founding fathers, the letter and the spirit of the GATS itself. Subjecting Art. XVI to Art. XVII GATS guarantees respect of the negative integration character of GATS. It thus avoids internationalizing issues that WTO Members want to keep in their domaine reservé. Counter-intuitively probably, it allows for more trade liberalization. Using the unfortunate US–Gambling report as an example, this report suggests an approach to understanding Art. XVI as a sub-set of Art. XVII GATS.

This paper reviews psychological reasons why the enthusiasm of the general public for free international trade might be less than that of the economist. Six specific reasons are advanced: (1) lay views of utility emphasize employment over consumption; (2) status quo bias results from loss aversion; (3) people think altruistically but parochially; (4) people often consider fairness in bargaining situations; (5) people may hold inappropriate fixed pie beliefs; and (6) people may misunderstand Ricardo's principle of comparative advantage. The reasons vary in their apparent rationality and appear to operate in concert rather than independently.

Ranging from the denial of direct effect to WTO law by the Court of Justice to a WTO-friendly legislative culture currently booming in the EU's political institutions, different approaches towards WTO law have been adopted within the EU. This article classifies the different approaches into reactive, coactive, and proactive by drawing on their common characteristics. The principal aim is to explore the considerations shaping the development of the different approaches and to argue that these stem from the interaction between the judiciary and the legislature. In doing so, this article purports to provide a comprehensive view of the application of WTO law within the Community legal order.

The Appellate Body decision in the steel dispute is the latest in a line of unsatisfactory decisions in the safeguards area. The problem stems from the fact that the treaty text regarding the preconditions for the use of safeguard measures is badly deficient. The Appellate Body with its usual emphasis on textualism has done little to resolve the puzzles that the text creates. WTO members are left with little guidance about the proper use of safeguards beyond some confusing and sometimes incoherent standards. We review these issues as they have arisen in prior decisions, and then discuss the details of the steel dispute. Our emphasis there is on the panel decision more than the Appellate Body report, as the latter breaks little new ground.

Kapstein begins by stating that ‘If any norm characterizes international economic relations, it is probably that they should be carried out on a “level playing field”’ (p. xi). He then sets out to offer his vision of what such leveling would amount to. The book offers what he calls a ‘liberal internationalist’ perspective on global economic justice, a view defined in opposition to two other views introduced and explored throughout: communitarianism, on the one hand, which according to him takes states too seriously by denying, beyond a certain minimal level, obligations to those who do not belong to them; and cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, which he thinks does not take states seriously enough by failing to acknowledge, to a sufficient degree, the special moral importance of shared citizenship. By way of contrast, liberal internationalism takes states as given, but acknowledges that there are moral obligations tying together states into a society of states, a society that, according to Kapstein's ideal, is supposed to be inclusive, participatory, and welfare-enhancing for all states.

The WTO, we hope, is an institution that mutes the importance of raw power – provides a system for working out problems among countries in which the interests of smaller countries are not always overwhelmed by those of larger. The two books reviewed both address this issue, but in different ways. The Odell volume (a collection of studies by different analysts) reviews a number of WTO events in which developed and developing country interests were at odds; e.g., the ‘bananas dispute’ involving Ecuador, the US, and the European Communities. The studies in that volume document the skill of developing country negotiators to use the system to their advantage; they demonstrate that the WTO process often came to outcomes more favorable to smaller countries than a simple weighing of relative power would imply.