Critical reviewMega-RTAs and LDCs: Trade is not for the poor

Various upcoming large regional trade agreements dealing with new generation trade issues and involving the developed, as well as several emerging market developing economies, exclude the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The LDCs are not strategically important enough for the other players to figure in these agreements. Nonetheless, these have important implications for the LDCs, particularly in terms of loss of preferential market access. Such preferential access, the paper argues, is likely to get confined to the WTO's multilateral framework in the longer-term leaving LDCs little strategic economic space outside the WTO.