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Goal
To provide students with a critical
appreciation of the various claims to special status for developing
countries - historical, political, and intellectual - that
have emerged over the years have influenced the application of
international trade rules to developing countries and the emergence of
special institutional mechanisms. As a result students should be well
placed to analyze how best to pursue trade and investment opportunities
in developing countries, how to negotiate with these countries and
resolve problems with them.
Topics
Covered
The course will cover the special economic, political and
institutional problems faced by developing countries, including problems
of governance, poverty, lack of resources and infrastructure, dependence
on a narrow range of traceable commodities, and consider how these
problems have influenced the development of both a mindset and a set of
special rules providing them with "special and differential
treatment," the impact of these rules, and the gradual impact of
changes in both attitudes and the rules over the last decade. Specific
topics that will be covered include the role of developing countries in
the negotiation of the GATT, the application of GATT article XVIII and
the development of GATT's part IV, the rise and decline of UNCTAD, the
use and abuse of commodity agreements, the special problems of trade in
textiles and clothing and trade in agriculture, the development of the
Generalized System of Preferences, the issue of "graduation,"
and the role of the developing countries in the Uruguay Round of GATT
negotiations.
Key
Books and Articles
Harrision,
Lawrence E., Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The Latin American
Case (Lanharn, Md: Harvard Center for International Affairs, 1985).
Hudec,
Robert E., Developing
Countries in the GATT Legal System (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf for the Trade Policy Research Centre, 1988).
Krueger,
Anne O., Economic Policies
at Cross Purposes: The United States and Developing Countries (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1993).
Lal,
Deepak, The Poverty of
‘Development Economics' (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1985).
Trebilcock,
Michael J. and Robert Howse, The
Regulation of International Trade (New
York: Routledge, 1995).
Case Material
The course will use material excerpted from
the GATT Trade Polity
Reviews of
selected developing countries, the MFA and bilateral textile agreements,
as well as UNCTAD documents to illustrate how developing countries have
used the concept of special and differential treatment both to their
advantage and detriment.
Criteria
for Evaluating Teaching and Student Performance
Throughout the course, students will work as
teams and develop written analyses of various specific problems in the
trade of developing countries and determine how a specific developing
country for which that group is responsible could have applied the
various available remedies or measures to solve the problem.
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