Law, Trade, and Development

Abstract This article examines trade and development through the terms on which states, firms, workers, and communities participate in international exchange. Trade law can make access more reliable and less costly but can also preserve unequal bargaining power, narrow public authority, or impose burdens poorer states cannot absorb. It maps liberal, institutional, developmental, and critical accounts and shows how GATT bindings, reciprocity, preferences, and special and differential treatment distributed access unevenly. It then considers predictability, implementation capacity, regulatory autonomy, security measures, investment facilitation, and digital trade. The Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement remains outside the WTO Agreement, while the Work Programme on Electronic Commerce and customs duty moratorium lapsed on 30 March 2026. The article also examines sustainability, fisheries subsidies, gender, public health, dispute settlement, plurilateralism, and remedies. Its central inquiry is not liberalization alone, but the quality and distribution of participation that trade rules make possible.