Decision-Making by Consensus in the WTO
Decision-making processes are among the most important methods of functioning against which the legitimacy of one institution may be rated. It is because they show how the organization treats its members and thereby fulfils the first and minimal level of accountability. Moreover, in the recent trend of international fora, especially the WTO, decision-making by consensus has become popular. This characteristic of the WTO makes it considerably and significantly different from other international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), where decisions are based on weighted voting. In the WTO, consensus based decision-making is popular, while voting is possible and/or mandatory only in some special cases. In voting process, each member state has one vote and therefore allowing equal status to all members irrespective of trade shares or general economic size. The principle of equality of voting status of member states is clearly seen in the formal structures of the WTO. The top body of the WTO is the Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years. The day-to-day workings of the WTO are carried out by the General Council. The General Council also meets in the guise of the Trade Policy Review Body and the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). Below the General Council are the Councils for Goods, Services and Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), along with Committees that report directly to the General Council. Representation at all three levels is open to all members of the WTO. The provisions stipulate the use of consensus and voting in the WTO covered Agreements will be examined in the first section. The advantages and disadvantages of consensus are the core discussion in section 2. On the one hand, consensus in decision-making offers developing countries with equal voice with their developed partners irrespective of trade shares and economic sizes. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of developing countries, they have to face a lot of disadvantages deriving from the consensus based decision-making. Finally, in order to help WTO become the most democratic, efficient, transparent and legitimate organization in promoting international trade, some recommendations about the reform of the WTO in the field of decision-making are raised.
The Law and Policy of the World Trade Organization: Text, Cases and Materials
1. Economic globalisation and the law of the WTO 2. The World Trade Organization 3. WTO dispute settlement 4. Principles of non-discrimination 5. Rules on market access 6. Rules on unfair trade 7. Trade liberalisation versus other societal values and interests 8. Towards harmonisation of national regulation 9. Epilogue.
An Introduction to Property Theory: Utilitarian Property Theories
As a leading property law casebook puts it, “[u]tilitarian theory is, without doubt, the dominant view of property today, at least among lawyers.” This is certainly true, but the story is also significantly more complicated. Although utilitarian analysis provides tremendous insight into the institution of property, it raises a number of important questions when treated as a comprehensive theory of property. Moreover, the term utilitarian masks a great deal of intellectual and methodological diversity. Rather than a single utilitarian theory, it is more appropriate to speak of a number of utilitarian (or even utilitarian-influenced) property theories . For our purposes, these utilitarian-influenced theories include many contemporary theories that refer to themselves as economic or welfarist . In this chapter, we will explore the broad outlines of these theories, focusing on their points of overlap and also on key areas of disagreement. A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO UTILITARIANISM Utilitarianism is a consequentialist moral philosophy, that is, one that judges the rightness and wrongness of actions or rules or institutions by the goodness and badness of the consequences they bring about. Utilitarianism assesses the goodness or badness of consequences in terms of their tendency to maximize utility or welfare. Bernard Williams has observed that “[t]he fathers of utilitarianism thought of it principally as a system of social and political decision,” as opposed to “a system of personal morality.” As Williams correctly notes, it is sometimes hard to keep these two domains apart. Nevertheless, it is plainly as a theory of social choice that utilitarianism has been deployed in the context of property theory.