Just Released, Bhagwati's Termites in the Trading System Critiques the Use of PTAs

Termites in the Trading System
How Preferential Agreements Undermine Free Trade
Jagdish Bhagwati

List Price: $24.95
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (July 14, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0195331656
ISBN-13: 978-0195331653

From the blurb: Writing with his customary wit, panache, and elegance, Bhagwati documents the growth of these PTAs, the reasons for their proliferation, and their deplorable consequences, which include the near-destruction of the nondiscrimination that was at the heart of the postwar trade architecture and its replacement by what he has called the spaghetti bowl of a maze of preferences. Bhagwati also documents how PTAs have undermined the prospects for multilateral freeing of trade, serving as stumbling blocks, instead of building blocks, for the objective of reaching multilateral free trade. In short, Bhagwati cogently demonstrates why PTAs are Termites in the Trading System.

About the Author: Jagdish Bhagwati is university professor, economics and law, at Columbia University and senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.