The name is absent

wealth of nations. For many, the outcome appears sufficient justification for the criterion.

3. Equality of Opportunity and Market Access

For the developed countries at least, the principles embodied in the GATT/WTO — reciprocity, MFN
treatment, and national treatment — appear to have provided a working guide to fairness. They have
been forged from long historical experience and have proved their value in promoting trade relations.
They therefore deserve great respect. However, none is free from ambiguities or easy to define in
operational terms. Perhaps the principle of MFN treatment is the least ambiguous though its clarity is
now under heavy attack as the number of bilateral trade agreements, all presented ostensibly as free trade
arrangements, has multiplied.⁵ National treatment is fraught with disagreements about its interpretation
and application, as we discuss later in the section on equality of opportunity and supporting rules. What
we focus on here is the use of reciprocity as a guide to fairness.

3.1 Reciprocity

The notion of reciprocity appears operationally important because it assuages the nationalist sentiment
that all states harbor and that could otherwise prevent them from gaining the improved market access that
they want for their exports. Evidently, no government, unless convinced of the benefits of unilateral trade
liberalization, is willing to be accused of giving away more to other states than it receives.⁶ Indeed, it has
sometimes been politically important for trade negotiators to claim at home that the concessions received
in multilateral trade negotiations are greater than the concessions granted. Were this in some objective
sense a reality, trade negotiations might have taken place much more infrequently since they would have
amounted to a zero-sum game. But, within the clerisy constituted by the trade negotiators from different
nations, this large political obstacle has been surmounted by adoption of equivalence as a conventional
basis for mutual concessions.

⁵ We do not comment further here on the relation between these bilateral arrangements and the fairness of the global
trading system though the erosion of MFN treatment clearly does harm to the perception of fairness.

⁶ There may, however, be other motives for participation in a global trade agreement. Some governments, for
instance, may welcome participation because it allows them to overcome internal opposition to the opening up of
domestic markets. This might make them less insistent on full reciprocity.

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