Book Review - Free Trade, Sovereignty, Democracy: The Future of the World Trade Organization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The former Director of the WTO Appellate Body Secretariat reviews Claude Barfield’s book, Free Trade, Sovereignty, Democracy: The Future of the World Trade Organization, which aroused great interest around the world when it was published. Until this book, the WTO dispute settlement system was viewed as the “jewel in the crown” of the WTO. Barfield, however, asked some penetrating questions and was critical of the new, legalized system and, in particular, of some of the Appellate Body’s early cases. She agrees with Barfield that there appears to be an asymmetry between the efficient and effective dispute settlement system and the less efficient rule-making system in the WTO. However, the remedy for this problem does not lie in returning to the ‘diplomatic’ model of dispute settlement. The ‘judicial’ model was developed precisely because the ‘diplomatic’ model did not work effectively – it did not always resolve disputes and it favoured the more powerful over the smaller, weaker states. If the problem is that the dispute settlement system is highly efficient while the rulemaking system is inefficient, should WTO Members not focus on how to make the rulemaking system more efficient, rather than return to an ineffective and inefficient model of dispute settlement? In the author’s view, Barfield’s analysis and conclusions are ultimately flawed because his understanding of the system is weak.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.052 | 0.035 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".