Book reviews

Abstract

Explicit or de facto discrimination in government procurement against foreign suppliers continues to be an intractable barrier to international trade. The importance of liberalization in this area is underlined by the fact that almost all bilateral and regional free trade agreements notifi ed to the WTO set out procurement-related commitments on transparency and non-discrimination. Yet, the WTO’s initiative in this area, the Agreement on Government procurement (GPA), has only plurilateral/voluntary status and is not therefore part of the Single Undertaking. A separate initiative to develop a multilateral procurement agreement which would be limited to transparency-based obligations, without seeking to prohibit discrimination, seems to have fl oundered on the rocks. Against this background, this volume brings together 20 previously published articles and essays on international procurement regulation. The chapters are preceded by an introduction by the Editors in which the overlapping rationales of national and international regulation are identifi ed. Attention is also given to the subject areas covered in the chapters, such as the incidence and economic consequences of discrimination in government procurement and the impact of international rules targeted at prohibiting this discrimination. Thereafter, the chapters are divided into three parts. Part I deals with the development of legal norms on procurement in the GATT/WTO context. The opening chapter by Blank and Marceau details the history of procurement negotiations from 1945 up to the entry into force of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Government Procurement in January 1996. Abbott’s focus in Chapter 2 is on what he perceives as the WTO’s failure to take action against bribery and corruption and on what this failure reveals about the institution’s rulemaking processes. The chapter explores these questions with reference to the ill-fated negotiations towards a multilateral transparencybased agreement. Chapters 3 and 4 are provided by Arrowsmith. The fi rst article, originally published in 2002, focuses on the then current, and recently completed, review of the plurilateral GPA. The second article deals with the negotiations towards a transparency agreement. It is suggested here that the negotiations have suffered from a failure to identify which regulatory objectives the agreement should be directed toward. Evenett’s 2003 paper closes Part I by evaluating the need for multilateral rules based on transparency. He highlights the limitations of transparencybased obligations when unaccompanied by non-discrimination disciplines, and describes the attempt to separate the negotiations on transparency from those on market access as ‘ fundamentally misconceived ’ . Part II deals with the economics of discrimination. Baldwin and Richardson open this part with the oldest contribution in the volume dating from 1972. This is a seminal paper in that it sets out a proposition which provided the departure point for much subsequent work. This theory posits that, when imported goods are identical to domesticallyproduced goods, and when government purchases are only a fraction of domestic supply, discrimination in favour of national suppliers has no impact on total imports, prices or government expenditures. By way of policy proposals, they call for a ‘ code of fair practices on government purchases ’ and would no doubt therefore have been pleased to see the entry into force of the GATT Tokyo Round procurement agreement on 1 January 1981. Book Reviews