| Book Title | The WTO and Technical Barriers to Trade |
| Book Author | Henson, Spencer and Wilson, John S. (eds.) |
| Bibliographic Information | Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc, 2005, Pages : 560, $230.00, ISBN 1845420497 |
Review note
The WTO and Technical Barriers to Trade. Edited by Spencer Hudson and John S. Wilson. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005. Pp. 560. $230.00.
Reviewed by Jacqueline Peel, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Melbourne, Australia.
The WTO and Technical Barriers to Trade is an edited collection of the previously published papers of economics and international trade law scholars, dealing with the broad area of technical barriers to trade (TBTs) posed by national regulatory measures. The papers are arranged by way of topic areas concerning: (1) theoretical developments in the understanding of TBTs and approaches employed in the assessment of their trade impacts; (2) standards on trade in goods; (3) sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures and (4) institutional responses (national and WTO-related) to the emergence of TBTs as a trade issue.
In their introduction to the collection, Spencer Hudson and John S. Wilson stress the inter-disciplinary perspective provided by the collected papers, a necessity given the mixing of law, economics (and increasingly) science, social science and environmental management that characterises analysis in the TBT area. The endeavour to provide an inter-disciplinary resource for TBT analysis makes the collection a useful one and, for international trade lawyers in particular, it provides access to works in the field of economic theory and agricultural economics that might otherwise be difficult to access.
The editors claim the collection offers a ‘snap shot’ of the current literature on TBT issues that ‘can provide a foundation on which the reader can build as issues in trade evolve over time’ (p. xii). The book should certainly be of broad interest to those working and writing in the TBT area as a collation of works by prominent authors on an important and developing area of international trade policy and law. As a snap shot of current literature, however, the book is somewhat lacking, particularly as regards judicial interpretation of the SPS Agreement. For example, there is no paper included in the collection which discusses the Japan Apples case decided by the WTO Appellate Body in November 2003, or the issues raised by the on-going (and highly controversial) EC-Biotech dispute. Overall, the collection (together with the editors’ summary of ‘key issues’) provides a good entrée into the subject of TBT measures; for up-to-date information and analyses of this fast-evolving area, readers will continue to need to rely on the periodical literature.
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