Africa/Global: The danger of Bilateral Trade Treaties

Pascal Lamy, the European commissioner for trade, recently wrote that "half the world's economists" were opposed to the epidemic of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs). The fact of the matter is that nearly all scholars of international economics today are fiercely sceptical, even hostile to such agreements. By contrast, politicians everywhere have succumbed to a mania that originated in Europe. Unfortunately, the economists are right. The politicians' lemming-like rush into bilateral agreements poses a deadly threat to the multilateral trading system, argues this article.