by Ryan McMaken
Mises.org
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is in a state of crisis. Despite grandiose dreams of a global trade organization that would enforce global bureaucrats’ broad vision for multilateral trade agreements, the world looks more and more like it neither wants nor needs an organization like the WTO.
CNBC reports this week that the WTO is in “a reform-or-die moment” as both the US and Chinese governments appear uninterested in taking orders from the WTO.
It once seemed like the WTO was a very big deal. When it was formed in the 1990s, scores of states — rich and poor, large and small — gathered to put together “rules” for how the sovereign states of the world would interact on trade. As Razeem Sally has noted, however, multilateral agreements were not what made global liberalization happen: