The Trading System in Crisis: The Threat from Proliferating Preferences

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.