In order to ensure that technical regulations and product standards which vary from country to country do not create unnecessary obstacles to trade the Agreement ofn Technical Barriers to Trade was adopted. It is paralleled by the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures which sets out the basic rules on how governments can apply food safety as well as animal and plant health measures without, however, using them as an excuse for protecting domestic producers. Prominent decisions under the WTO Dispute Settlement, as for example int he Beef Hormones Case, have interpreted those...

This volume deals with the GATT 1994 and all related agreements, which include those on Agriculture, Textiles and Clothing, Trade-Related Investment Measures, Implementation of Article VII GATT 1994, Preshipment Inspection, Rules of Origin, Import Licensing Procedures, Trade in Civil Aircraft and Government Procurement.

With the WTO TRIPS-Agreement, intellectual property issues have become an integral part of the world trading system. The Agreement probably represents the most significant and controversial development in world trade law. The Agreement is comprehensive in scope and contains standards for protection of a number of intellectual property rights as well as rules on the enforcement of such rights. Furthermore it closely links to the well-established traditional international system of the protection of intellectual property rights - the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization and related...

This volume will be a valuable reference tool for the WTO community as a whole, as well as for professionals and researchers, who deal with one of the sectors concerned, e.g. financial services and telecommunications.

In the decade since the establishment of the WTO, the great majority of disputes between member states resolved and decided through the dispute settlement system of the WTO arose in the field of trade remedies law, a fact which clearly shows the high demand by the trade community for the rule of law in this area. Responsive to such needs, the fourth volume encompasses the whole range of trade remedies regulation under the auspices of the WTO in the respective articles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the related multilateral agreements on trade in goods, i.e., Articles...

The Max Planck Commentaries on World Trade Law explain the whole range of world trade law in seven individual article-by-article type commentaries. While the first volume (WTO - World Economic Order, World Trade Law) serves as a nutshell-type introduction to the WTO, the remaining six volumes focus on specific aspects of WTO law. The second volume (WTO - Institutions and Dispute Settlement) brings together the WTO institutional fundamentals and the whole dispute settlement. The third volume (WTO - Technical Barriers and SPS Measures) deals with the most...