Executive Summary

The World Trade Organisation represents the unifying global association that brings divergent economies, legal systems, customs, internal policies and political systems into a sphere whereby a common ground in terms of a level playing field is established for all member nations. Favouritism, special interest, and other imbalances are eliminated to bring the term globalisation into a uniform as well as universal context. As is expected, the World Trade Organization has defined rules, regulations, procedures and processes to ensure this level playing field remains level, regardless of the size, influence or resources of its differing members. And therein lies the reason as to why it has been effective. And while there are critics who have their individualistic opinions and comments, some well-founded, and others not, no one has proposed another forum to improve upon and or replace the WTO, which dispute its imperfections, functions!

The preceding represents the organisation that the Russian Federation is seeking admission to. Such has been a process that has entailed over a decade and is still not concluded. The reasons for the aforementioned shall be examine herein, as well as the changes, modifications and other facets that the country is being called upon to modify in accordance with accession rules. Given the past history of the Russian Federation, the transition to a market economy has and does represent substantive changes with regard to internal policies and practices impacting upon all areas of the country’s economy. Such transitional changes have been successfully broached by China as well as Vietnam and other former communist states, so the challenge facing the Russian Federation has precedent. This examination shall delve into the aforementioned accession process with respect to the Russian Federation, looking into the country’s most dominant and important industrial sections to gauge the impact the process has, is having and will have in terms of impact.

Chapter 1 – Introduction

In order to understand the context of the World Trade Organisation as well as its impact on Russia, and its industries, notably oil, gas, and construction, one must delve into the broad area of world trade in general as a foundational understanding for this examination. Globalisation has been utilised as a format to discuss as well as explain many issues, world trade of course being a major component of the foregoing. Mann (1993, p. 9) provides a broad understanding of the complexities and context of