Free Trade Today is a set of three lectures given by Jagdish Bhagwati at the London School of Economics. Bhagwati, a professor at Columbia University, was formerly Economic Policy Adviser to the Director-General of GATT. He now advises both the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.

The most interesting part of the book is Bhagwati's take on bi-lateral Free Trade Areas. He is not a fan. He prefers to call them Preferential Trade Areas, arguing that - with over 400 of them - they lead to a "spaghetti-bowl". The book includes a couple of diagrams to give the idea. He says that Preferential Trade Agreements lead to trade being misdirected from the lowest cost producers. Let's say that America can buy radios from two countries. It imposes the same tariff on each country's goods - a level playing field. Americans will most likely import radios from the cheapest country. But if America enters into a Preferential Trade Agreement with the more expensive of the two countries, the level playing field goes. Americans may now be able to buy radios most cheaply by buying from the more expensive country. So radio production changes from the most efficient producer to a less efficient producer. Thus, Bhagwati prefers multilateral and unilateral agreements (and opposes the idea of bilateral ones).

On the other hand, it is clear that those countries who form part of a Preferential Trade Agreement do better economically than if the trade agreement had not been created. Unilateral agreements are difficult to do politically, and multilateral agreements are much more difficult to achieve than bilateral ones. Bilateral agreements act as a healthy competitor to the WTO process, helping to keep the WTO on track. They also help resolve difficult issues before the WTO has to worry about them. In essence, Preferential Trade Areements help prepare the way for multilateral agreements. But if you can get a multilateral agreement, that's preferable to a bilateral one.