BIT501 | International Trade Law

The course will offer fundamental understandings of how the world trade system functions, with a focus on the World Trade Organization (WTO) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regimes. It will trace how international trade law has evolved normatively through GATT negotiations and subsequent implementation. The General Agreement on

Tariffs and Trade was the first attempt to introduce the liberal international trading regime. Though the GATT’s scope was limited to good, its transition to WTO several sectors related to trade such as intellectual property rights, investment, anti-dumping, most favoured nation treatment, national treatment, quantitative restrictions, settlement of disputes to name a few. The course will highlight the developments from the GATT that aimed at reducing the tariffs to establishment of WTO that has created a self-contained regulatory regime. The developments in technology and influence of trade on environment transformed the WTO’s functioning and dispute resolution. The vast and varied membership to WTO comprising of developed, developing and least-developed countries makes its functioning complex particularly in the context of ineffectiveness of special and differential treatment provision that were meant to ameliorate the problems of developing and least developed countries. The course hence not only presents the institutional and normative structure of the WTO but also underscores the contemporary concerns and debate around this regime.