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Recent crises in trade policy and globalization highlight both the problematic role of economic inequality in international trade law and the shortcomings of contemporary, largely economic, approaches to this problem and to international trade law generally. This book argues for an alternative approach to the problem of trade and inequality, as a problem of justice. Drawing on political and moral theory and legal philosophy, the author develops a Rawlsian model for justice as fairness in international trade law. This model highlights the important normative role of the principle of special and differential treatment, which can justify economic inequality by making the wealthy markets of developed states work to the benefit of smaller economies, thus satisfying the difference principle as applied to international economic relations. Applying this model to contemporary trade law, the author offers concrete proposals for modifying existing special and differential treatment doctrine, and suggests "second generation" policies for the problem of inequality once special and differential treatment is either fully implemented or rendered obsolete. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint

"The notion of flexicurity was introduced in the late 1990s. It promotes the idea of compensation of deregulation of labour markets (= flexibilization) by advantages in employment and social security, in particularly for flexibly employed (other than permanent full-time, called also atypically employed). This paper suggests an operational definition of flexicurity, taking into account different views of liberals and trade unions. The corresponding flexicurity indices are derived from (a) data on the dynamics of employment types, (b) scores of the strictness of employment protection legislation provided by the OECD, and (c) qualitative juridical data on social security. To convert the latter into numbers, eight employment types (permanent full-time, fixed- term part-time, etc.) in 16 European countries are ranked with respect to their eligibility to five social security benefits (unemployment insurance, public pensions, etc). To avoid known shortages of ranking, the Method of Total Ranks is proposed. The ranks replace continuous variables as index entries, and a dedicated model estimates the total index error which results from such an 'ordinal rounding' of the index input. The flexicurity indices are calculated for 16 European countries for the years 1994-2003. Contrary to theoretical opinions, the current deregulation of European labour markets is not compensated by improvements in the social security. If the flexicurity advantages/ disadvantages are accounted proportionally to the size of affected groups then the factual trends are negative even from the viewpoint of liberals, to say nothing of trade unions. The reciprocity of the advantages/ disadvantages turns out to be illusory, because gains are smaller than losses and winners are fewer than losers. Thereby the study warns against promoting flexicurity policies with no operational control and empirical feedback." (author's abstract)

Since its current account surplus hit its peak in 1994, the environment surrounding the trade policies of Japan has been changing. The author reviews the recent trend of Japan's trade policies. He notes that service sectors are now in the corner of structural change under strong pressure of international competition in this country. More and more people in the industries now believed liberalization is a better strategy than regulation and protection for strengthening the competitiveness of the industries. (DÜI-Sen)