The WTO, we hope, is an institution that mutes the importance of raw power – provides a system for working out problems among countries in which the interests of smaller countries are not always overwhelmed by those of larger. The two books reviewed both address this issue, but in different ways. The Odell volume (a collection of studies by different analysts) reviews a number of WTO events in which developed and developing country interests were at odds; e.g., the ‘bananas dispute’ involving Ecuador, the US, and the European Communities. The studies in that volume document the skill of developing country negotiators to use the system to their advantage; they demonstrate that the WTO process often came to outcomes more favorable to smaller countries than a simple weighing of relative power would imply.
Oxymoronic Applications of Neo-Institutional Economic Models - Frank K. Upham, The Great Property Fallacy: Theory, Reality, and Growth in Developing Countries (New York/Cambridge University Press, 2017) pp 160. Paperback: $23.