Beyond the WTO? An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements
34 Pages Posted: 28 May 2009
There are 2 versions of this paper
Beyond the WTO? An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements
Beyond the WTO? An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements
Date Written: May 28, 2009
Abstract
It is often alleged that PTAs involving the EC and the US include a significant number of obligations in areas not currently covered by the WTO Agreement, such as investment protection, competition policy, labour standards and environmental protection. The primary purpose of this study is to highlight the extent to which these claims are true. The study divides the contents of all PTAs involving the EC and the US currently notified to the WTO, into 14 'WTO' and 38 'WTO-X' areas, where WTO provisions come under the current mandate of the WTO, and WTO-X provisions deal with issues lying outside the current WTO mandate. As a second step, the legal enforceability of each obligation is evaluated, judged on the extent to which the text specifies clear obligations. Among the findings are:
(i) EC agreements contain almost four times as many instances of WTO-X provisions as do US agreements; (ii) but EC agreements evidence a very significant amount of 'legal inflation' (i.e., non-legally enforceable provisions) in the WTO-X category, and US agreements actually contain a more of enforceable WTO-X provisions than do the EC agreements; and (iii) US agreements tend to emphasize regulatory areas more compared to EC agreements.
Keywords: Preferential trading agreements, enforceable, legal inflation, WTO, European Union, United States
JEL Classification: F13, F15, K33
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Major Trade Trends in East Asia: What are Their Implications for Regional Cooperation and Growth?
By Francis Ng and Alexander J. Yeats
-
Multilateralising Regionalism: Spaghetti Bowls as Building Blocs on the Path to Global Free Trade
-
Multilateralising Regionalism: Spaghetti Bowls as Building Blocs on the Path to Global Free Trade
-
The Political Economy of Declining Industries: Senescent Industry Collapse Revisited
By S. Lael Brainard and Thierry Verdier
-
Managing the Noodle Bowl: The Fragility of East Asian Regionalism
-
The Formation of International Production and Distribution Networks in East Asia
By Mitsuyo Ando and Fukunari Kimura