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Editorial. Comments on the trade policies enacted by U.S. President George W. Bush. Consideration of the promotion of free trade; Effects of reconstruction in 1945; Significance of the Doha Development Agenda, a trade policy agreement launched by the U.S. and the European Union; Status of the World Trade Organization; Criticism from European publications with regards to the regional and bilateral free-trade negotiations made by the U.S.

The article focuses on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) a free-trade agreement that would govern one-third of all trade in the global economy. Topics include Japan's decision to join negotiation talks in June of 2013, the fear that the U.S. will impose American standards on commodities, and the inclusion of economic exemptions, also known as carve-outs, for participating countries.

The article reports that Taiwan has been left out of the trade agreement between East Asian nations, liberalizing the services trade between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Taiwan managed to join the World Trade Organization against Chinese objections, but has been excluded from the talks for the bilateral free-trade agreements that are springing up as the Doha talks stall indefinitely.

Anti-capitalists and advocates of free trade seldom agree on much.An idea that is readily accepted by both sides in the globalization debate is that the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Geneva-based outfit that oversees multilateral trade arrangements, makes a difference. Almost nobody doubts that the WTO and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), have helped to boost global trade, by encouraging countries to lower their tariff barriers in successive rounds of trade negotiations. Andrew Rose, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, claims that the WTO has been ineffective.