Private Rights vs Public Standards in the WTO

Sol Picciotto, Lancaster University Law School

9/29/2008
(Original Publish Date: 10/1/2003)

The recent debates about globalization show that it is a contested concept, reflecting very real conflicts about the nature and desirable trajectory of changes in the international political economy. Since the mid-1990s, the neo-liberal view, which prioritized deregulation and the removal of barriers to market access, has been increasingly challenged. It is now more generally accepted that globalization in reality involves complex processes of re-regulation. Far from entailing a shift to a `free' world market, the global economy operates within a framework of multi-level governance.