WTO Working Papers

This study surveys preferential rules of origin applied by 192 regional trade agreements (RTAs) covering trade in goods notified to the GATT/WTO up to 1 November 2010. It takes into account the preferential rules of origin that were notified to the WTO; whenever known and available, modifications to the original rules of origin have been updated. This study contains two basic features: a description of some key elements of preferential rules of origin in RTAs, followed by an attempt to provide a reality-check of how these rules affect actual trade. That is done by an ex-post examination of data on the use of RTAs' preferences and, in their absence, of their margins of preference (MOPs). While the raison d'être of preferential rules of origin is the avoidance of trade deflection, the practice in RTAs has diluted this objective and it would seem that preferential rules of origin are increasingly becoming an economic, political and trade instrument. In its descriptive part, the study identifies what seems to be a tendency to design stricter rules of origin, while detecting concomitantly the inclusion in modern preferential rules of origin of flexibilities that provide, through the rules of origin themselves, a preference beyond the lower tariff rate resulting from the preferential treatment and mechanisms that allow the integration of third-parties into preferential rules of origin regimes. The reality-check part of the study points to the fact that much beyond the coverage of RTAs, it is their effective implementation that poses a challenge to economic operators. Though data on the use of preferences is either not disclosed or inexistent, they are nevertheless available for some economies. On the basis of existing data of preference utilization, the analysis of the effects of rules of origin on preferential trade flows appears to give rise to a dual reality - namely a relatively high use of preferences in certain instances coexisting with preferences failing to attain their potential in other cases. As regards RTAs for which utilization rate is not available, the paper analysis preferential rules of origin from a MOPS perspective, assuming that MOPs of at least 5 percentage points would offset compliance costs and thus provide a stimulus to comply with rules of origin in order to benefit from preferences. The analysis, made for 68 out of 192 RTAs, do not allow any conclusion regarding that generally presented hypothesis. Finally, the paper briefly outlines some suggestions for further action, including the launching in the WTO of exploratory work on preferential rules of origin within an "open regionalism" scenario.

Without transparency, trade agreements are just words on paper. Transparency as disclosure allows economic actors and trading partners to see how rules are implanted; transparency in decision-making ensures fairness and peer review. In the first section of this paper, I discuss the logic of transparency in general and the motivation for its use in the trading system. Considerable information on WTO transparency mechanisms is available in the Minutes and annual reports of the various WTO bodies, and in the Director-General’s annual overview of the trading system, but comparative analysis is not easy. In the second section, therefore, I develop a framework in which different transparency mechanisms can be compared to each other using the metaphor of three generations in the evolution of transparency in the trading system as a means of explaining how transparency works in the WTO. For sunshine to work, at least two things must happen. Information must be made available, and Members have to use it. Probing the extent to which Members comply with their notification obligations, in the third section, and their efforts to improve the notification process, allow an assessment of their commitment to being transparent. In the fourth section I consider how WTO committees are used to ensure that Members are accountable for their commitments, including to notify. Since the committees differ, I use the metaphor of the great pyramid of the legal order to compare committees to each other. Assessment of whether these mechanisms work underpins observations in the conclusion on whether more sunshine is needed, and efforts underway to improve existing mechanisms.

This paper reviews a number of initiatives taken by public and private institutions aimed at minimizing the impact of the on-going crisis of the financial sector on its ability to supply trade finance to support trade at affordable rates. In doing so, it draws a few policy lessons. One of them is that a relatively stable segment of the financial industry is now regularly hit by the contagion of financial crises, with potentially very harmful spill-overs on global trade through a dry up of its financing. Specific policy measures to restore confidence in this otherwise safe market required a good level of coherence and dialogue between national governments and international and regional development organizations. Lessons from the Asian and Latin American financial crises of the late 1990's have been learned and academia provided input by developing understanding on a previously under-rated topic in the literature. Learning-by-doing and leadership have also been features of the policy response, which altogether had some successes. Still, longer-term challenges remain, such as addressing the structural gaps in the availability of trade finance in low-income countries - ad hoc programs have been designed to fill the gap between the perceived and actual risk of extending trade credit to traders in these countries. Moreover, regulation of the trade finance market needs to continue to take into account its low-risk character, the absence of leverage and its impact on development.

Rising current account and merchandise trade imbalances marked the years before the global financial and economic crisis. These imbalances either contributed to or precipitated the crisis and to the extent that they create systemic risks, it is desirable that they be reduced. There are many factors related to macroeconomic, structural, exchange rate and financial policies that contributed to the imbalances. The inability to manage these issues at the international level reflects the “coherence gap” in global governance. This paper examines the contribution that the WTO can make in its three areas of activities — negotiations, rule-making and dispute settlement — to deal with trade imbalances and with the main factors leading to them, including exchange rate misalignments. First, market opening efforts in services, including in the area of financial services, can reduce policy-related distortions and market imperfections in surplus countries that lead to the build-up of unsustainable imbalances. Second, in the context of a broad international effort to coordinate macroeconomic, exchange rate and structural policies to deal with the roots of imbalances (the first-best solution), there is a general efficiency argument that could be made for the use of WTO-triggered trade actions to enforce cooperative behaviour towards rebalancing. Absent this first-best response, trade rules alone would not provide an efficient instrument to compensate for the weaknesses in international co-operation in macroeconomic, exchange rate and structural policies.

This paper assembles detailed information about the intellectual property (IP) provisions contained in 194 active regional trade agreements (RTAs) that had been notified to the WTO by November 2010. IP provisions in RTAs have been the subject of much study and commentary. However, much of this work has focused on a relatively limited number of RTAs, with a concentration on parties with narrow geographical and economic profiles. The goal of the current study was to expand beyond the more commonly studied RTAs, to make an initial review of the full array of RTAs notified to the WTO, and in that way to lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive overview that would enable consideration of the broader system implications of this more diverse range of norm-setting activity. This was tackled by conducting a comprehensive mapping of the IP content in a larger number of RTAs involving parties from all regions and across different levels of development. This broad approach is necessary to better understand cross-cutting trends in RTAs, and how all the parts of the international IP framework influence each other. The methodology followed involved surveying each RTA in the sample to determine whether it made reference to any of 30 different IP-related provisions. The relevant provisions are discussed in detail and summary statistics used to identify patterns over time and by continent, level of economic development, and selected traders. The number of IP provisions in each RTA is then used to classify agreements according to their level of IP content. The first significant identified trend is the acceleration in the conclusion of RTAs with IP provisions after the creation of the WTO and the entry into force of the WTO TRIPS Agreement. A significant proportion of those RTAs contain some type of IP provision, but the number and type of those provisions vary widely across agreements. More than two-thirds of the RTAs surveyed include provisions on border measures or statements of general commitment to IP protection or cooperation. A smaller proportion contains explicit provisions on specific fields of IP law, such as geographical indications, patents, trademarks and copyright. The inclusion of even more detailed provisions elaborating on specific areas of IP law is less common. As a result, the actual IP content of RTAs differs greatly across the sample, with about 40% of these agreements found to have negligible substantive IP standards. A significant number of RTAs containing more detailed IP provisions are characterized by a hub-andspoke architecture in which the wording and structure of IP provisions converged around the RTAs of specific countries or blocs. The largest systems are grouped around the EFTA, the European Union and the United States with countries like Chile, Japan and Mexico constituting other hubs. The huband- spoke architecture seems to have encouraged the convergence of domestic IP regimes among the respective RTA signatories. The mechanics of this potentially crucial process and its economic implications require further investigation. The analytical methodology followed in this paper also needs additional development to take better advantage of the information gathered together in the course of this study and other data.

The study tries first to assess the extent of similarities and divergences among services rules in regional trade agreements as compared to the GATS. To do so, it uses a typology identifying variations in 48 key provisions structured under seven themes commonly found in RTAs and using the GATS as a benchmark. The analysis identifies two main “families” of agreements GATSinspired and NAFTA-inspired) and a residual category. The paper briefly explores the historical development that led to these families as well as their geographical spread both on an agreement by agreement basis and a country by country basis. The paper then analyses by theme the variations found in the RTAs among services rules including their novelty as compared to the GATS. Given the lack of available information on the implementation of the agreements the paper tries to assess whenever possible the magnitude of the discrepancies and their practical impacts. While subject to some qualifications, the results of the study are relatively straight forward: there is no "spaghetti bowl" in services rules, but just two "families" and one residual category. The details reveal that the degree of divergence between those two families does not overall seem insurmountable. This assessment concords with other studies (e.g. Marchetti, Roy) that have equated them in terms of national treatment and market access and have compared directly commitments undertaken under the three families of agreements. One may even note a certain tendency to a convergence towards the GATS model (e.g. the addition of market access clause in the second generation of NAFTA-like agreements or the use of GATS-type architecture by EU for agreements else than pre-adhesion ones). In terms of "novelty" the results prove somewhat disappointing except in certain areas like mode 4 and transparency. Other issues in which, in view of the intensity of WTO DDA debates, one would have expected a lot of bilateral creativity, such as domestic regulation, safeguards and recognition provisions show themselves to be surprisingly embryonic. Finally anecdotal evidence, gathered for instance during the drafting by the WTO Secretariat of Trade Policies Reviews and factual presentations on RTAs suggest that in numerous instances, provisions relating to future negotiations or even regular meetings are not implemented thereby casting doubt on the effective impact of RTA provisions (including diverging ones) on trade realities.

Are market access commitments on services in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) reciprocal or simply unilateral? If reciprocal, do concessions granted in services depend on concessions received from the trading partner in other services or in non-services areas as well? In this paper we investigate the presence of reciprocity in bilateral services agreements, by sub-sector, mode of supply and type of agreement (North-North, South-North, South-South). To do so, we use a database of concessions given and received by 36 WTO Members in 40 services PTAs. Results reveal the presence of reciprocity at the product (sub-sector) level and across economic sectors (i.e., preferences in services trade in exchange for preferences received in goods trade). Reciprocity is stronger in agreements between developed countries. The findings provide insights into motivations for services PTAs, but also the multilateral negotiations. Indeed, the negotiation of services PTAs provides an incentive to withhold services offers in the Doha Round in order to extract more - reciprocal- concessions at a bilateral level. The existence of reciprocity on a sectoral basis may also hold lessons on optimal ways to improve the multilateral negotiating process.

This paper examines the rationale for the rules on domestic subsidies in international trade agreements through a framework that emphasizes commitment. We build a model where the policy-maker has a tariff and a production subsidy at its disposal, taxation can be distortionary and the import-competing sector lobbies the government for favourable policies. The model shows that, under political pressures, the government will turn to subsidies when its ability to provide protection is curtailed by a trade agreement that binds tariffs only. We refer to this as the policy substitution problem. When factors of production are mobile in the long-run but investments are irreversible in the short-run, we show that the government cannot credibly commit vis-à-vis the domestic lobby unless the trade agreement also regulates production subsidies, thus addressing the policy substitution problem. Finally, we employ the theory to analyze the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM) Agreement within the GATT/WTO system.

With international trade moving from "trade in (final) goods" to "trade in tasks", effective protection rates (EPRs) are back to the stage, allowing us to measure the overall protection of a product or sector by including the production structure and the origin of the inputs -domestic or imported. Input-output matrices are used in this paper to monitor the production structure of 10 Asian-Pacific countries between 1995 and 2005, and to calculate sectorial EPRs. The paper proposes a series of counter-factual simulation methods aimed at isolating the specific contribution of changes in tariff policies, in production structure or in real exchange rates. Working on international input output matrices allowed also to compute and compare the average propagation length of a cost-push linked to a sudden change in tariff duties, identifying those sectors that are the most deeply interconnected, both in the intensity and in the length of their inter-industrial foreign relationships.

At first glance, this paper deals with a simple classification issue only: the coverage and treatment of certain manufacturing operations and the resulting products under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) rather than under its long-standing counterpart in merchandise trade, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Yet there are important structural/conceptual differences between the two Agreements, which may have far-reaching consequences, inter alia, for the use of GATT-based tariffs and trade remedies (anti-dumping and countervailing measures). It is submitted that the currently applied classification system could prompt companies to (re-)define the ownership conditions of otherwise identical production activities, with a view to avoiding GATT disciplines. However, the relevant criteria separating goods- from services-related operations are not only hard to specify and monitor in practice, but it is also difficult to see an underlying policy rationale. In the interest of clarity and consistency, WTO Members might thus want to close this conceptual trapdoor. Due to the rapid proliferation of international production-sharing arrangements, the stakes will likely be rising.