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Regional trade agreements notified to the GATT/WTO by year of entry into force, 1948-2016
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Canada has an effective trade agreement with all of our significant trading partners in the WTO, but its rules are slow to adapt to the rapidly changing economic realities analyzed in other chapters in this volume. As trade negotiators experiment with alternatives in a G-zero world without a country or group of countries able to impose global order...
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Citations
... Once the parties have an agreement on paper, they have to bring it to life, which depends on effective institutional design. Reciprocal obligations, the basis of any trade agreement, depend on opportunities for the constant development and affirmation of shared understanding of what the obligations mean (Wolfe, 2015). Such opportunities require transparency; and accountability to partners. ...
... Finally, the handful of articles cast in obligatory terms are potentially justifiable, though skepticism is warranted about whether the dispute settlement mechanisms in these two agreements will be used any more than the dispute settlement provisions in other RTAs (Wolfe, 2017). ...
... For a more extensive discussion of this claim, seeWolfe (2017). Learning about Digital Trade s65 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. ...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that every ambitious twenty-first century trade agreement is in want of a chapter on electronic commerce. One of the most politically sensitive and technically challenging issues is personal privacy, including cross-border transfer of information by electronic means, use and location of computing facilities, and personal information protection. States are learning to solve the problem of state responsibility for something that does not respect their borders while still allowing twenty-first century commerce to develop. A comparison of the Canada–European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) allows us to see the evolution of the issues thought necessary for an e-commerce chapter, since both include Canada, and to see the differing priorities of the US and the EU, since they are each signatory to one of the agreements, but not of the other. I conclude by seeking generalizations about why we see a mix of aspirational and obligatory provisions in free trade agreements. I suggest that the reasons are that governments are learning how to work with each other in a new domain, and learning about the trade implications of these issues.
... Some of the explanations for the WTO's difficulties lie outside the organization in a general malaise of multilateralism (Wolfe, 2015b;Wolfe, 2017b), now exacerbated by an Administration in Washington that in putting America First sees a competitor, not a partner, in China, but continuing as before and hoping for a better outcome would be foolish. Muddling through is no solution, and outsiders cannot help. ...
The World Trade Organization (WTO) has three primary tasks, to negotiate new rules, monitor implementation, and settle any disputes that arise. It is not fulfilling any of these tasks very well at the moment. Should Members just muddle along, hoping for the best, or seek external advice on how to change the WTO operating system? This paper suggests a third possibility: a systematic discussion of transparency by encouraging institutional learning could help Members to recover a shared sense of collective purpose. On the basis of such a detailed vertical review, Members might be able to come to a consensus on how to improve the functioning of the system.
Some may see in any discussion of information an attempt by large countries to impose new obligations. Better information might help Members navigate current negotiation impasses, but that is an incidental benefit of a discussion in each committee about whether the organization is doing as well as it can monitoring current obligations.
This paper discusses the meaning of institutional learning, and whether other international organizations have lessons for the WTO on how to do it, with particular emphasis on the OECD In-depth Evaluation of Committees process. It then suggests reframing the debate on transparency by asking first whether WTO information is good enough then why Members do not notify as much as they might. If Members think that they lack information on the trading system, the trade policy review process might help. After a review of previous efforts to improve WTO transparency, including the processes launched by the Nairobi ministerial declaration, the paper concludes with a proposal on how WTO can encourage institutional learning by a systematic discussion in each committee of whether WTO information is good enough.
... With WTO negotiations stalled, regional negotiations became a forum for trying to advance disciplines on new issues, often explicitly designed to develop new rules without China (Wolfe, 2016). While the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement of early 2016 is now dead, or at least in limbo, it does contain the most extensive attempt of any preferential agreement to draft rules for SOEs, based in part on the provisions of the Singapore-U.S. FTA (Sylvestre and Marcoux, 2016, 17ff). ...
... I have argued elsewhere that Chinese accession to TPP is unlikely(Wolfe, 2016). ...
State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are a major force in the Chinese economy and a growing presence in international trade and investment. The challenge to the WTO legal regime is commercial, given the size of SOEs and their share of Chinese output, and political, given worries that trade and investment by SOEs may be driven by public policy goals. And both challenges may be exacerbated by the murky world of Chinese SOEs. In this article, I first review whether Chinese SOEs are a problem for the WTO, and whether more sunshine on their operations might be a useful discipline. I then ask what we know about SOEs inside the WTO, including in the Trade Policy Review Mechanism. Since the answer is, not much, I consider whether mega-regional trade negotiations offer a better approach. My answer being negative, I finally consider whether an attempt to negotiate a WTO Reference Paper on SOEs might help. I conclude that transparency is likely to be a better discipline on the spillovers associated with SOEs than a search for binding rules, while also helping everyone better understand the efficiency effects.
