The Right to Trade: Rethinking the Aid for Trade Agenda

Aid for trade is a fixture in the development landscape, accounting for approximately 25 per cent of total ODA, and is being positioned as a building block in the future development agenda beyond the 2015 expiry of the Millennium Development Goals. In The Right to Trade, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton argue that aid for trade has not delivered on its initial promise. To create a genuinely pro-development trade liberalisation agenda, the authors propose that a ‘right to trade’ and a ‘right to development’ be enshrined within the WTO’s dispute settlement system; and that aid for trade funds be consolidated into a coherent and predictable framework, where dedicated funds are committed by rich countries to a Global Trade Facility and dispersed through a transparent and competitive process. Together these proposals would help ensure that international trade works for developing countries and will help preserve a development-friendly multilateral trading system.