Brexit, the TPP and the future of the global trading system

Photo of my event

Brexit, the TPP and the future of the global trading system

Professor Andrew Lang

Abstract: This historic decision of the British people to leave the European Union has revealed a number of the fundamental challenges and tensions which have bedeviled the post-Cold War projection of economic globalization from its beginning. The interests of the less well off in wealthy industrialised countries have been systematically neglected over thirty years, as the benefits of liberalization have been disproportionally enjoyed by relatively few. The vote for Brexit, when set in the context of the current wave of ambitious FTA negotiations prominently including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, shows that radically different views of imagining our global economic future persist, and cannot be wished away. This talk will explore some of the ramifications of Brexit for the global trading system, and suggest that at the heart of the current problems is a long-term tension between the need to remedy global inequality on one hand, and the need to secure social protections for the less well off in the industrialized world on the other.

Andrew Langis Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and is visiting Melbourne to teach Global Governance in the Melbourne Law Masters. He is the author of World Trade Law after Neoliberalism : Reimagining the Global Economic Order (Oxford University Press, 2011).