GEI Newsletter Issue No. 4 - Report

Also in this issue:

Editorial

Report on the CEPR/GEI Workshop ‘Competition, Regulation, Standards and Trade Policy for Information and Telecommunications Services’

‘The New Commercial Policy Agenda: Strengthening or Overburdening the WTO?’
30 May 1996 at RIIA, Chatham House
Workshop on Subsidiarity in the Governance of the Global Economy

On 29 May 1996 the LSE project also organized a workshop on ‘Subsidiarity in the Goverance of the Global Economy’. Contrasting with the policy orientation of the conference, the workshop addressed longer term, more fundamental issues concerning the evolution of the international trading system. Of particular interest was how could the concept of 'subsidiarity', be applied in a global setting, given that pressure to add ever more issues to the WTO agenda raises issues equivalent to those raised in regional economic integration, such as the effectiveness and accountability of the multilateral regime.

The workshop was divided into three sessions. The first session considered papers on legal, economic and political approaches to defining 'subsidiarity' in the global economy. The papers were, by Jacques Bourgeois, College of Europe (discussant John Jackson), Pierre Sauvé, OECD (discussant Patrick Messerlin) and Geza Feketekuty (Center for Trade and Commercial Policy, Monterey). Session two considered a paper by Stephen Woolcock, LSE, (discussant Frank Vibert) on the empirical evidence from the LSE/GEI project, which discussed how subsidiarity was defined in practice in a number of policy areas. The third and concluding session compared US and European approaches to international regime formation as well as the processes or procedures used to decide on regime formation. A paper by Kalypso Nicolaidis and Cary Coglianese of the Kennedy School of Government focused on the latter, while a paper by Michael Hodges, Director of the Centre for Research on the United States (CRUSA), LSE, considered EU and US approaches to international regime formation.

It is envised that these papers, along with a number of the case studies considered during the LSE/GEI project will form the basis of an edited volume on the topic of subsidiarity in the global economy.

For more information and papers contact: Professor Stephen Woolcock, European Institute, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK, tel: (44 20) 7955 6796, email: woolcocs@lse.ac.uk

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