Rare indeed is the book that explains global trade regulation simply and clearly. Even rarer is the book that brings the subject to life - making tangible its very real impact on each of our lives. Professor Condon's text achieves both ends. His lucid writing renders a difficult topic accessible. His practice of commencing most chapters with a detailed real-life case study means his reader knows the setting and context for the rules and theory, before being exposed to them. The author then concludes most chapters with a second case study so as to anchor the theory in real trade disputes.
The soporofic effects of most trade regulation texts are notably absent here.
This is an excellent example of the scholarship of integration. Its great contribution lies not in new discoveries but rather in making easily understandable that which so many other authors make obscure and difficult. The author's unremitting commitment to placing his points in the context of real trade disputes brings them to life and allows the reader to appreciate their importance.
The book is primarily focussed upon NAFTA and WTO rules and procedures and is addressed directly to the audience of business people who have to navigate their way through those rules. The first half of the book addresses the global trading system and the trade regimes for goods, services and intellectual property. It then proceeds to analyse foreign investment agreements and to consider strategies in the negotiation and enforcement of trade agreements. Finally the topic of how AIDS, trade and terrorism affect our economic future serves to place the text firmly in the context of contemporary events. It should be noted that this final topic, which constitutes the sub-title of the book, is one chapter in eight. Potential readers should appreciate that the focus of the book is very much on NAFTA and WTO rules and appropriate business strategies to deal with those rules. The sub-title serves to highlight a very interesting and timely chapter in the book, not to elucidate its major themes.
The primary audience for this book comprises two groups. The first are those to whom it is expressly addressed -- business people who trade or engage in direct investment across national boundaries, or those whose businesses are affected by such trade or investment.
The second group are students of law and business. I expect these students will love this book. Students, as a whole, tend to distrust theory and ignore that which they cannot see to be relevant. Professor Condon's unrelenting real world focus leaves no reader with any doubt that this topic really matters, today, in our economy, and in our lives. The clarity of his writing also invites the reader in - one wants to keep reading in part because it is so easy to do so. This book will work better in most classrooms than texts written deliberately for that purpose.
This book will serve practising lawyers who are encountering this field for the first or second time very well. I can think of no better general introduction to the field. But the breadth of its coverage and relative shortness work against it satisfying all the needs of detail-oriented experts. The book also has an understandable North American focus. The author is a Canadian who works in Mexico and NAFTA is one of its major themes. Readers from outside North America may wish for less consistent use of North American examples and case studies. Then again, for such readers who export to or invest in North America, few books explain so clearly the interplay of the NAFTA and WTO regimes and highlight the strategic choices available to business that thereby arise.
This is a particularly timely book. The effects of the September 11 attack are well analysed in the chapter devoted to that and other horrors. The agenda agreed upon in Doha in November 2001 is well integrated throughout the work.
Anyone engaged in international trade or direct investment could not fail to benefit from reading this book, and its lucid and interesting style makes it a comfortable companion on the long flights such business often entails. For those who do such work, or seek through their education to be qualified to do so, it offers a simple, clear and thus precious roadmap to an area that is apt to confuse.
(Revised version of a review written by Professor Ross Buckley and published in Kyklos (an economics journal).)
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