"The
bilateral track involves workers' rights clauses in trade relations between a country and its trading partners."
(Tsogas, G.,
Labor Regulation in a Global Economy, London: M.E. Sharpe, 2000, p. 21)
"The World Trade Organization has been created in recognition of the need for powerful rule-based institutions to facilitate global trade. Yet alongside the WTO, unilateral and
bilateral actions are continuing, such as those of the US. This means that the credibility and effectiveness of the new system is being constantly undermined by assertions of the old power-political hierarchy as the basis for order in international trade."
(Woods, N., "Order, Globalization and Inequality", in Held, David and Anthony McGrew,
The Global Transformation Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, 2nd Edition, Cambridge (UK): Polity Press, 2003, p. 469)
"In a recent paper, Maggi (1999) argues that in an asymmetric environment with
bilateral imbalances of power, a multilateral institution such as the WTO can play a crucial role in verifying violations of trading agreements and facilitating multilateral enforcements, although this argument loses force in a symmetric environment."
(Goyal, S., and Josghi, S.,
Bilateralism and Free Trade, Econometric Institute Report 995, 1999, visited 2009-04-05)
