Do WTO rules preclude industrial policy? Evidence from the global economic crisis

Aggarwal Vinod K. and Simon Evenett
Additional contact information
Aggarwal Vinod K.: Berkeley – Political Science, University of California, BASC, 552 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1970, USA

Business and Politics, 2014, vol. 16, issue 4, 29

Abstract: The creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 was a landmark in the development of the liberal international economic order. Yet the global economic crisis of 2008 brought with it a resurgence of debate over whether or not WTO membership limited the policy choices of governments coping with distress. This Special Issue of Business and Politics uses the crisis as a “stress test” for evaluating the prominent thesis that multilateral trade rules presently impose sharp limits on national industrial policies. The evidence from a wide range of sectoral and national contexts suggests that the WTO’s ability to constrain member governments’ use of industrial policy is highly exaggerated. As we argue in this introductory essay, and as the studies in this Issue show, assertions of the WTO’s strength do not reflect the incomplete and contested nature of its accords and the imperatives of policymaking in an era when many governments simultaneously intervene in national economies.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/bap-2014-0040 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:buspol:v:16:y:2014:i:4:p:29:n:6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.cambridg ... usiness-and-politics

DOI: 10.1515/bap-2014-0040

Access Statistics for this article

Business and Politics is currently edited by Vinod K. Aggarwal

More articles in Business and Politics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().