Developing countries and world trade: Performance and prospects

It is a sign of troubled times when, in the search for solutions to the most pressing policy challenges of the day, it is considered necessary to look to earlier generations for guidance: a Marshall Plan - this time to fight global poverty - a Tobin tax to check financial volatility and Keynesian spending package to combat deflationary dangers spring readily to mind. The source of the trouble is the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of a liberal international economic order. Nowhere is this gap more evident that in the international trading system. Even as Governments extol the virtues of free trade, they are only too willing to intervene to protect their domestic constituencies that fell threatened by the cold winds of international competition. Such remnants of neo-mercantilist thinking have done much to unbalance the bargain struck during the Uruguay Round.