The agonies of the Multilateral Trading System
As of late, the Multilateral Trading System has been beset by several serious agonies. The symptoms have been obvious. The 11th Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which took place in December 2017 in Buenos Aires, has demonstrated that the WTO’s rule-making function is no longer performing as expected: with the exception of a shared willingness to collectively and constructively work further on the issue of disciplining fishery subsidies, it did not result in any new normative multilateral outcome. Likewise, the WTO’s dispute settlement function has been affected by a stalled selection process for its new judges. If this situation persists, the WTO might cease to be the Multilateral Trading System’s final legal arbiter.