The Removal of Trade Barriers

The draft Charter of the proposed International Trade Organisation and the text of the existing General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade are attempts to remove barriers to international trade on as non-discriminatory and multilateral a basis as possible among as many countries as possible. Mr. Brown's book is a thorough and scholarly account of the contents of these two instruments,2 of the intricate relationships between them, and of the protracted, complicated, and difficult negotiations which led up to them. The compromises which finally emerged constitute a notoriously verbose and sometimes unsystematic interweaving of rules, exceptions to rules, and exceptions to exceptions to rules, concerning a very wide field of commercial and economic policy. Mr. Brown's appendix of almost 200 pages in which he attemnpts a systematic analysis of the obligations, rights, and other contents of the I.T.O. Charter on all the topics covered, should be of great use as a source of reference for all those who are doing serious work in this field. It is as difficult to review Mr. Brown's book in a few sentences as it would be to review an encyclopedia in a few paragraphs. It is in fact a quite indispensable work of reference for those who want to know what these two international instruments contain and (what is often necessary for that purpose) how they came to contain it. It deals essentially with a very large number of particular issues in commercial policy, most of great importance and many

Business · Charter · Economics · Encyclopedia · Field (mathematics) · International trade · Law and economics · Negotiation · Political science · Work (physics) · Global trade and economics · Law · World Trade Organization Law

• The transmission of international trade norms, ideas and expertise into national statutory institutions

  Nicola Charwat, Jodie Boyd•Griffith Law Review•2019

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