Trade policy wonks are gathering in Geneva this week. Not for WTO negotiations, but for a conference on multilateralising regionalism. It launched yesterday morning and concludes Wednesday afternoon.

Multilateralising Regionalism is a two and a half day conference dedicated to exploring these issues, and in particular, the relationship between regionalism and the multilateral trading system. The first two days of the conference will explore how regional trade agreements might be tamed through a multilaterally based approach to redefining trade cooperation. The final half day will consist of a high-level discussion by policymakers and scholars of the issues teased out in the first part of the conference.

The conference papers don’t seem to be available online (UPDATE: The WTO has now uploaded them!), but they will be published by the WTO as a monograph. Pascal Lamy’s opening remarks:

One might well ask what yet another conference on this subject can add. My answer to this is that I believe this conference is asking a number of questions that have not previously been addressed, notwithstanding the proliferation of scholarly literature.

We are not really asking here why so many regional agreements have sprung up — that question has dominated many a debate, and many interesting explanations have been offered. Rather, this conference looks forward and asks questions about how policymakers, traders and businesses think about, and react to, the explosion of regionalism…

A key idea underlying this conference is that the tangle of overlapping trade agreements will increasingly generate an interest in multilateralizing regional arrangements, in expanding them — or in other words, collapsing them into larger entities that bring us much closer to a multilateral system of trade arrangements. The question, then, is what forces and interests might push trade relations in a multilateralizing direction.

I covered Richard Baldwin’s paper on multilateralising regionalism back in July 2006.

UPDATE: The papers are available online now. That’s a lot of reading to do this weekend!

A special issue of the Pacific Economic Review features papers from a conference titled The Economics of the Doha Round and the WTO, held at the University of Hong Kong on 16–17 December 2005, in parallel with the Sixth WTO Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong, with appearances by Robert Baldwin, Bernard Hoekman, Kym Anderson, Will Martin, Michael O. More, and others.

The latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives has some top notch trade economists discussing their research specialties.

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Ben Muse presents a pair of “scary campfire tales for economic policy analysts,” in which Joseph Francois and Brad DeLong lament the hostility of government bureaucrats and representatives to trade policy analysts. After reading those, you might reach for Simon Evenett’s “The trade policy jungle: a survival guide for academic economists” (pdf) in hopes of calming your fears.

While the Doha negotiations are going nowhere fast, the Uruguay round might be moving backwards — its implementation is up in the air due to a court case decided this week. Orin Kerr reports:

Golan v. Gonzales, a fascinating Tenth Circuit case… went most of the way towards striking down section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act on First Amendment grounds. As I understand it, this section of the act restored the copyright of some foreign materials that had fallen into the public domain; it was passed to satisfy the U.S. treaty obligation to afford the same copyright protection to foreign authors as U.S. law provides to U.S. authors. Golan’s argument is that taking the materials out of the public domain violated the First Amendment.

I just learned of this case, and most of the bloggers covering it are lawyers, so I don’t know the implications for trade policy or how other countries might react.