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Due to globalisation and their role as enablers in global value chains, services are playing an increasingly important role in international trade. The supply of services around the world provokes an increased vulnerability to certain barriers, created by differing domestic regulation. This increase is caused by the fact that services are being supplied in various countries, at the same time, which obliges the service supplier to adapt to every country's domestic regulation regarding his specific service. The need for country-specific adaptation to domestic regulation entails significant (sometimes even prohibitive) costs.The fact that services value chains and services-intermediates have grown immensely has implications for the global economy and the trade barriers that need to be addressed. However, the present normative framework for trade does not adequately deal with the issue of regulatory incoherence. This paper compares the approach taken in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and contrasts its incompleteness with the new provisions in both the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The aim of this paper is to assess whether these two new "deep-RTAs" successfully include new disciplines dealing with regulatory incoherence.
This publication highlights how the WTO’s Agreements on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and the work of their related Committees promote opportunities for regulatory cooperation among governments and ease trade frictions. It demonstrates how members’ notification of draft measures, harmonisation of measures with international standards, discussion of specific trade concerns and other practices help to facilitate global trade in goods. The study also makes recommendations on how to benefit further from the transparency and cooperation opportunities provided by the TBT and SPS Agreements.
This paper discusses what could be done to expand services trade and investment through a multilateral agreement in the World Trade Organization. A distinction is made between market access liberalization and the regulatory preconditions for benefiting from market opening. The authors argue that prospects for multilateral services liberalization would be enhanced by making national treatment the objective of World Trade Organization services negotiations, thereby clarifying the scope of World Trade Organization commitments for regulators. Moreover, liberalization by smaller and poorer members of the World Trade Organization would be facilitated by complementary actions to strengthen regulatory capacity. If pursued as part of the operationalization of the World Trade Organization's 2006 Aid for Trade taskforce report, the World Trade Organization could become more relevant in promoting not just services liberalization but, more importantly, domestic reforms of services policies.
The WTO plays an important role in supporting efforts to achieve international regulatory cooperation (IRC) and to facilitate trade. First, the WTO provides a multilateral framework for trade among its 164 members, with a view to ensuring that trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely as possible. Second, the WTO’s Agreements provide important legal disciplines, helping to promote good regulatory practice and IRC at the domestic level as a means of reducing unnecessary barriers to trade. This publication highlights how the WTO’s Agreements on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and the work of their related Committees promote opportunities for regulatory cooperation among governments and ease trade frictions. It demonstrates how members’ notification of draft measures, harmonisation of measures with international standards, discussion of specific trade concerns and other practices help to facilitate global trade in goods. The study also makes recommendations on how to benefit further from the transparency and cooperation opportunities provided by the TBT and SPS Agreements.
Regulations and enforcement decisions that at first appear to have only a domestic impact can have substantial spillover effects on other nations' economies. Experience has shown time and again that there is no reason to expect that these effects are confined to jurisdictions at the same level of development. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic recognize this, yet their responses in many policy areas are not aligned — sometimes deliberately so. This creates a complex regulatory landscape that appears to be the product of both cooperation and competition, and which can only be fully understood by looking through a number of disciplinary lenses.Drawing on some of the best legal, economic and political science expertise from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as on the knowledge of officials and private practitioners with experience in both industrialized and developing countries, this timely book assesses the systemic, global implications of transatlantic regulatory cooperation and competition. Insights from thematic papers are integrated with those from sector-specific analyses, and a rich set of implications for policymakers, business and civil society is offered.
The publication contains an explanation of Most Favored Nation (MFN) treatment and some of the key issues that arise in its negotiation, particularly the scope and application of MFN treatment to the liberalization and protection of foreign investors in recent treaty practice. The paper provides policy options as regards the traditional application of MFN treatment and identifies reactions by States to the unexpected broad use of MFN treatment, and provides several drafting options, such as specifying or narrowing down the scope of application of MFN treatment to certain types of activities, clarifying the nature of "treatment" under the IIA, clarifying the comparison that an arbitral tribunal needs to undertake as well as a qualification of the comparison "in like circumstances" or excluding its use in investor-State cases.
This volume contains a collection of studies examining trade-related issues negotiated in regional trade agreements (RTAs) and how RTAs are related to the WTO's rules. While previous work has focused on subsets of RTAs, these studies are based on what is probably the largest dataset used to date, and highlight key issues that have been negotiated in all RTAs notified to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). New rules within RTAs are compared to rules agreed upon by WTO members. The extent of their divergences and the potential implications for parties to RTAs, as well as for WTO members that are not parties to RTAs, are examined. This volume makes an important contribution to the current debate on the role of the WTO in regulating international trade and how WTO rules relate to new rules being developed by RTAs.
This paper advocates changes in the corporate governance of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reflect the decline in tariffs and other border restraints to commerce and the emerging challenges of advancing freer trade and better regulation cooperation in a world economy dominated by global value chains. Together, these changes form an integration strategy that we refer to as the new WTO Think. This strategy remains rooted in the original rationale of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) of reducing the negative externalities of unilateral action and solving important international coordination challenges, but is more inclusive of regulators and non-state actors and more flexible and positive in its means. In particular, we advocate that the WTO should embrace the confluence of shared social preferences and trade, where it exists, as a motivation for advancing international regulatory cooperation. The WTO should also multilateralize the important regulatory cooperation occurring in smaller clubs of like-minded countries and better facilitate the use of plurilateral agreements where consensus across all WTO members is not yet possible.