BooK Review - La soluzione delle controversie commerciali tra Stati tra multilateralismo e regionalismo. By LAURA ZOPPO, Napoli: Jovene editore, 2013. ISBN 978-88-243-2216-4, pp. xxviii–396.

This very interesting volume by Laura Zoppo, the final result of the research conducted during her PhD Course in International Law and EU Law at the Università La Sapienza in Rome, concerns the relation between the WTO dispute settlement system and the increasingly numerous regional economic courts, dealing with an aspect of the larger issue regarding the connection between the Marrakech multilateral system and the agreements of regional economic integration, be they named as Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), Customs Unions (CUs), or more, generally, Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) or Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). This topic is of central importance in the current governance of international trade. In fact, the WTO system has not been able to agree on new rules to improve the legal framework of international exchanges since more than ten years –even if we may now record the adoption of the Bali Package reached in Indonesia in December 2013, which was the first positive result for a WTO Ministerial Conference after many failed attempts. The vacuum left by the many failed promises of the Doha Round, unable to reduce and/or remove traditional obstacles to trade and to give adequate answers to the many sustainability issues pressing our current global economic system, has been filled by the traditional and emerging economic actors through the conclusion of new generations of bilateral or plurilateral trade treaties. The timely book here reviewed represents a very good and helpful contribution to the very intricate –and, unfortunately, too often neglected- topic of the relation between multilateral and regional dispute settlement pillars, fully analyzing the law and the case law developed on the relation between RTAs and the WTO.