The Global Context and the Debate on Trade and Development

International trade has since the end of the Second World War been an integral part in the efforts to build an interdependent world. Since then, the world economy has witnessed three important global trends: changes in economic relations and global market forces, and rapid changes in technology and innovations. An important characteristic of global economic relations has been the massive liberalisation of the world trade. These global processes, accelerated by recent advances in information and communication technology especially from the late 1990s, have led to unprecedented flow of goods, capital, and people across the world. These interdependencies have served to deepen international economic relations and ultimately, the expansion of multilateral rules to govern increasing sectors of world trade, accompanied by further trade liberalisation. In the process, we have witnessed the establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to promote and enforce such relations.