Farms, Phones and Learning in the Trade Regime

  • Robert Wolfe
Chapter
Part of the International Political Economy Series book series (IPES)

Abstract

Farms and phones may seem an unlikely pair for a discussion of international institutional innovation, but they symbolize the two sources of enormous political controversy that dominated the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations (1986–93) — the old issue of agriculture, and the ‘new issues’ of intellectual property, investment and services. The theme of the Round was globalization, understood as change in the things that are traded, and in who is trading them. The expanding domain of the global market, both functionally and geographically, challenged states anxious to maintain social control of the economy while promoting dynamic growth, the basis of the ‘compromise of embedded liberalism’ underpinning the Bretton Woods system (Ruggie, 1983). The process of adaptation, of maintaining the compromise, proved to be similar in both domains.

Keywords

World Trade Organization Market Access Telecommunication Service Uruguay Round Trade Regime 
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Copyright information

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2002

Authors and Affiliations

  • Robert Wolfe

There are no affiliations available

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