This book explains the need for institutional reform of the WTO at this critical juncture in world history and provides innovative, practical proposals for modernizing the WTO to enable it to respond to the challenges of the twenty-first century. Contributors focus on five critical areas: transparency, decision- and rule-making procedures, internal management structures, participation by non-governmental organizations and civil society and relationships with regional trade agreements.

The term “offshore” conjures images of tax havens and financial institutions located in the small island states of the Caribbean or microstates of Europe. The small twin-island state of Antigua and Barbuda, located in the Eastern Caribbean, has pursued revenue-making opportunities through the sale of Internet gambling licenses. while Internet gambling has proven to be a lucrative form of development for Antigua, its controversial nature has led to a protracted international debate and trade conflict with the United States before the WTO.

This brief discusses some possible directions for future global WTO-based policy co-ordination beyond the Doha Round and ways of building on existing WTO agreements in the medium term -- perhaps over a period of decades.

This paper highlights the ailing state of global health governance as evidenced by the lack of progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in particular the goals related to health. Policy coherence within the global health governance system is not evolving fast enough to ensure that trade and development issues related to public health, particularly concerning access to medicines, are effectively aligned at national, regional and multilateral levels. The paper briefly reviews the WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement and the 2001 Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health. A case study outlines the manner in which "TRIPS-plus" provisions in selected US free trade agreements (FTAs) have undermined multi-level policy coherence in trade, development and public health. The discussion then identifies three unique governance mechanisms of the G8 that make the group a potentially powerful catalyst for innovation in global health governance, and assesses the opportunities that the 2008 G8 Hokkaido Summit may offer. The paper concludes by offering recommendations for enhancing multi-level policy coherence and for strengthening the system of global health governance.