Picking the Wrong Fight: Why Attacks on the World Trade Organization Pose the Real Threat to National Environmental and Public Health Protection

Alasdair R. Young

Global Environmental Politics, 2005, vol. 5, issue 4, pages 47-72

Abstract: A principal reason for popular concern about the World Trade Organisation is that national rules-especially those for environmental and public health pro-tection-may be overturned because they are incompatible with the WTO's rules. This article argues that while these concerns are not totally unfounded, they are exaggerated. A central reason for this exaggeration is that environmental and consumer advocates discount the pivotal role of governments in the dispute resolution process. Governments agree to the multilateral rules in the first place. Governments decide which market access barriers to pursue and how aggressively. Governments determine how to comply with a WTO judgment that goes against them. Furthermore, this article contends that by exaggerating the constraint imposed upon national governments by the WTO, consumer and environmental advocates run the risk of actually discouraging the very environmental and public health regulations they favor. Copyright (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2005

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/152638005774785435 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:5:y:2005:i:4:p:47-72

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/glep

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is edited by Peter Dauvergne

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().