Not a new methodology and not so much a new discovery as an unconventional way of seeing familiar facts.

The world is currently experiencing a surge of international regulations aimed at limiting the development policy options of developing country governments, dressed as the "will of the international community." The recent agreements of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are a clear case in point. The agreement on investment measures called Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMS) and the one on services, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), serve to limit the authority of developing country governments to constrain the choices of companies operating in their territory; while the one on intellectual property, called Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), requires governments to enforce rigorous intellectual property rights of foreign (Western) firms—and to allocate expensive skilled people to this task, who have alternate uses. The paper makes some suggestions, both broad and narrow, for rethinking the role of multilateral economic organizations.

  How did you become involved in this research?

The paper grew out of my belated discovery of the significance of the change, in 1995, from the old GATT (General Agreement on Trade & Tariffs) to the WTO. The significance in terms of the WTO being much more "intrusive" into domestic policy-making (more focused on deep rather than shallow integration), and intrusive, with the aim of fostering an Anglo-American type of free market capitalism (as distinct from allowing scope for a wide range of capitalisms, including egalitarian capitalisms with social controls on the scope of the competitive principle). Suddenly I realized that the World Trade Organization was a more powerful organization than the one which I knew better, the World Bank, and that anyone concerned with world development had to understand what it was doing and how it was organized.