None of this augurs well for Laos's bid to join the religiously free-market World Trade Organization.
And I think there's also going to be maybe even an evening out of the terms of trade, because it's a myth to think we live in a world of free trade, of course.
Last November, thousands of demonstrators vented their frustration about free trade and corporate globalization at a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
It was a victory for free trade, island style: the World Trade Organization ruling that the U.S. violated the General Agreement on Trade in Services by banning transactions with Internet gambling sites on the island of Antigua.
One of the most critical--and too often underappre-ciated--factors in economic growth here and around the world is free trade.
However, I reject the "managed trade" approach of the World Trade Organization, North American Free Trade Agreement and Central American Free Trade Agreement.
He champions unionized labor and working families and would immediately cancel U.S. participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), claiming that they push American jobs overseas.
The World Trade Organisation, which oversees the free flow of physical trade, might be a suitable body for keeping digital goods and services flowing too.
Laura Dawson is an expert on Canada-US trade who believes that companies like Blackberry and the trendy sportswear designer LuluLemon were allowed to flourish and take on the world because of free trade.
And given the importance of maintaining American support for talks to liberalise trade in financial services, to expand the North American Free-Trade Agreement and to bring China into the World Trade Organisation, an upsurge of Japan-bashing and anti-import rhetoric in Washington would quickly affect the rest of the world.
It has not wanted to join the 11 Latin American countries with free-trade deals with the world's biggest economy.
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Boeing, Caterpillar, Toyota Motor and countless others would have a deep interest in setting up operations, gaining access to the largest free trade zone in the world.
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The museum's collection vividly charts Dubai's rapid progress from a tiny pre-oil fishing and pearling village - and one of the world's first free-trade ports - through to the Arabian metropolis it is today.
The centre-left governments that have ruled since 1990 have signed free-trade agreements with half the world.
If other countries can simply take intellectual creations without paying for them, then wealthy nations have much less to gain from a free trade agreement and the entire world innovation system suffers.
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In economic terms, the UK is a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a body charged with promoting global free trade.
And they may pioneer new ideas which can later be taken up multilaterally: the Australia-New Zealand free-trade agreement, for example, deals with competition policy, which the World Trade Organisation has not yet touched.
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Mr Obama has expressed more support lately for completing free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea, the Doha round of world trade talks, and the Trans Pacific Partnership, but that has not translated into results.
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Even as free trade and electronic communications bring the world closer together, kinship still counts.
You might conclude from all this that free trade has little to offer the world's poor, especially in Africa.
After the deal goes through, Chinese will be free to trade with most countries in the world free of major tariff restrictions.
Indeed, economic thinkers of the World War II era understood that free trade was a growth-enhancing gift for promoting economic individual specialization and cooperation among global producers, and that a lack of unfettered trade in the 1930s arguably gave us the horror that was World War II.
Russia is about to join the World Trade Organization, the club of free traders.
The World Trade Organisation should work towards the free movement of goods, capital and workers.
Of course any progress towards more open and free trade is a net good for the world.
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There is a world of difference between fair trade and free trade, between globalisation and global capitalism.
That might be the cornerstone for an even bigger free-trade area eventually including China, the world's second-biggest economy.
Britain should leave the club, such ultrasceptics growl: world trade rules would guarantee tariff-free access to EU economies.
But there is little appetite to abandon the world of floating exchange rates, while free trade talks, also encouraged at Bretton Woods, have stalled.
The prime minister told BBC News the WTO talks would be "definitive, frankly, about whether the world's prepared to opt for free trade or not".
BBC: NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Blair will 'call bluffs on trade'
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