There are common
characteristics to the schemes of multilateral institutions that successfully
supported nondiscriminatory trade liberalization in developing countries in the
past – accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) since 1995 and
policy-based lending (PBL) by international financial institutions (IFIs) in
the 1980s and the 1990s. Both represent and combine unilateralism as a subject
of liberalization, bilateralism as a mode of market access negotiations, and
multilateralism for the final approval, as integral elements of their
institutional design. Future trade-related initiatives by multilateral
institutions should be designed based on such hybrid multilateralism that
integrates unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral approaches and worked in the
past. After the global financial crisis in 2008–2009, the world economy entered
the phase of ‘slowbalisation’ and is presently faced with geoeconomic
fragmentation. Multilateral institutions should help endeavour to
‘re-globalize’ the world trade landscape. To this end, aid for trade by IFIs
can reactivate use of trade-related conditionalities in their PBL operations
for developing countries, and the WTO should enhance its Trade Policy Review
Mechanism (TPRM).