Handmaiden in Distress: World Trade in the 1980s

Richard Stubbs was a professor at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, N.S.

This short monograph was sponsored by three development-oriented organizations in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. Its purpose was to provide a background to the Ministerial meeting of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade called for November 1982. The two authors, from Yale University and the University of Toronto, respectively, are economists with considerable experience of international trade negotiations. They saw the Ministerial meeting as presenting a major opportunity for completing some of the unfinished business from the Tokyo Round and for setting in train a number of long-term reforms. In a brief review of the GATT the argument is made that the three basic precepts — unconditional nondiscrimination, predictability, and transparency — have recently been eroded and that reinforcing them is crucial. The authors are critical of U.S. attempts to have trade in services included in the GATT discussions; however, they do feel that a number of issues such as a “GATT for investment” and “GATT for migration” should be included on a long-term reform agenda.

The interested but uninitiated reader as well as the specialist will find the discussion a useful general review of the state of play in the GATT. Certainly, the Ministerial meeting demonstrated how correct the authors were to be so worried about the prospects for international trade relations. Unfortunately, it also showed how unlikely it is that their proposals for reform will be adopted in the near future.