The Trading System in Crisis: The Threat from Proliferating Preferences

31 July 2006

Professor Jagdish Bhagwati

Preferential trading arrangements are becoming increasingly popular among the nations of the world. But are they a positive development?

In the Fourth H W Arndt Memorial Lecture – presented by the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific and the ANU College of Business and Economics – Professor Jagdish Bhagwati argues that bilateral, sub-regional and regional free trade agreements, and the granting of one-way preferences to developing countries of choice, are creating a massive erosion of the non-discrimination that the architects of GATT endorsed as a central principle of the world-trading regime. Professor Bhagwati documents this erosion and addresses ways in which we must respond to it.

Broad Topics: Asia and the Pacific, Business and Economics

Sub-topics: Commerce, Economics, International Business, Policy & Political Science

Areas: ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU College of Business and Economics

Professor Bhagwati is University Professor at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. A native of India, he is a graduate of Cambridge, MIT, and Oxford, and has held positions at the Indian Statistical Institute, the Delhi School, MIT, and Columbia. He has published more than 300 articles and 50 volumes, and also writes frequently for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times.

Professor Bhagwati has been described as the most creative international trade theorist of his generation, and he is a leader in the fight for freer trade. His most recent book, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford 2004), has attracted worldwide acclaim.

Part of the 2006 Toyota-ANU Public Lecture Series