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This paper looks at how the WTO Secretariat matters. With the exception of narratives on the Director-General?s role in decision-making in the biannual Ministerial meetings, there is great lack of understanding of the functioning of the secretariat. The first part of the paper reviews the role of the secretariat from a rational design view in a historical perspective and describes the secretariat?s functions in rule-making and rule-implementation. The puzzle to be addressed is why in rule-implementation the agent holds substantial discretion, while in rule-making the agent enjoys only few delegated powers. The paper applies a principal-agent framework and puts forwards scope conditions ? derived from sociological and rational institutionalism ? for the agent to matter. Empirically the paper traces the discretion the secretariat holds and focuses on the dominating factors that explain the modes (and variance) of agency behaviour. Finally, the paper tests a number of alternative explanations for agency behaviour dominant in the literature on international organizations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linkage between trade and competition policy adds an important dimension to the new trade politics. As firms increasingly trade and invest internationally, the decisions of competition regulators can increasingly interact with the political decisions that govern trade policy. Competition regulators prefer promoting international convergence and cooperation as a means to avoid trade-related and other political interventions in their regulatory decisions. This paper employs a venue shopping model of policy change to identify those international organizations through which the European Union’s Directorate General Competition is most likely to seek cooperation and convergence in international competition policy. The Directorate General Competition shops among four different international organizations—United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Trade Organization and International Competition Network. Five different legal features frame and determine Directorate General Competition’s preference for selecting among these different venues, which, in turn, helps to explain the current and future dynamics of competition policy in the new trade politics. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]