Watch experts debate the benefits of global trade and how the current crisis will affect the international trading system.

Listen to experts debate the benefits of global trade and how the current crisis will affect the international trading system.

The "buy American" provisions in the stimulus bill presented President Obama with the first test of his trade philosophy. In this Forbes article, Edward Alden and Jeremy Haft write that Obama has passed this test. The apparent compromise over these provisions is reassuring.

Award-winning historian Walter Russell Mead says, "The key political question of the twenty-first century is, 'How does the U.S.-China relationship develop?'"

A downbeat Davos summit brings warnings of trade protectionism into the limelight. Economists say these concerns should be taken into account as leaders of industrialized nations craft economic stimulus plans.

Brad Setser argues that while national policy considerations dominate debates on macroeconomic policies, these debates need to take into account the global consequences of their policy choices.

A summation of the state of international trade in 2007, with predictions for 2008.

In the face of the global financial crisis, the Doha Development Round must be concluded
as soon as possible, and protectionism and unilateralism must be avoided in order to make trade
“the most powerful tool for growth and production”, experts said.

Harvard's Jeffrey Frankel evaluates the potential detrimental impact that the WTO could have on climate change policy.

In this New York Sun op-ed, Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya make the case for optimism on the Doha Round. A compromise is possible if the U.S. agrees to cap trade-distorting subsidies at a minimum of the current payouts and India agrees to a downscaling of the Special Safeguard Mechanism.

With the Doha trade round in danger of slipping from our grasp, it has become commonplace to assert that the food crisis, while a tragedy, is a shot in the arm for the talks. In this Financial Times op-ed, Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya find that only one such argument passes muster—the fact that high food prices should soften U.S. opposition to lower agricultural subsidies, thereby relaxing key constraints on the final compromises necessary to reach an agreement on agricultural liberalisation.

CFR's Sebastian Mallaby cautions the next U.S. president that "green tariffs" could undermine the legitimacy of the World Trade Organization.

How the WTO boosts economies and opens societies.

When the WTO talks among the G-4—the United States, the European Union, India and Brazil—collapsed last month, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab squarely laid the blame on India as the villain of the piece. Jagdish Bhagwati argues that US and EU agricultural subsidies are the real culprits.

The WTO talks between the G-4 nations—Brazil, India, the United States and the European Union—have collapsed yet again, and the U.S.'s inability to respond to long-standing, world-wide demands for the reduction of its (and the EU's) agricultural subsidies are mostly to blame, argue Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya.

The collapse of global trade talks prompted some analysts to pronounce the WTO’s Doha round dead. Counterintuitively, some free-trade hawks say this might not be such a bad thing.