International Trade in the 21st Century

Fundamental changes in recent decades have heightened the need for new and viable solutions to the problems of world trade. In the new climate of internationalisation an expanding number of firms are engaged in international trade, barriers have been coming down, and trading blocs, whose members may share the advantage of lower tariffs and the absence of quotas, are beginning to predominate. Such systems, however, have a generally negative impact on global trade and can be catastrophic for developing and non-industrialised economies.

The degree of recent change has created an uncertainty that now demands new global trade systems - a new set of rules for the new environment. This book tackles some of the unresolved issues in international trade that will continue to press into the next century: the continuing controversy over NAFTA; globalised trade policy agreements vs local trade agreements; global leadership; the development and impact of the WTO; the Single European Market; trade controls; transition economies; trade policy reform; global airline competition; competition in financial services; trade wars; trade policies; commercial policy, and international technology cooperation.