Regional trade agreements

This paper examines trade remedy provisions in regional trade agreements (RTAs). By trade remedies are meant anti-dumping, countervailing and emergency or safeguard measures. Anti-dumping and countervailing duties can be levied on exporters who engage in ‘unfair’ trading practices that cause material injury to domestic producers. These unfair trading practices can take the form of selling products below their ‘normal’ price or of benefiting from government-provided subsidies. Safeguard actions can be taken even if there is no unfair trade practice so long as imports have increased to an extent that serious injury has been suffered by domestic producers. No matter the difference in conditions under which they can be triggered, all these instruments represent internationally agreed means for a country to temporarily increase the level of trade protection received by its injured domestic industry.

The increasing number of regional trade agreements (RTAs) negotiated by countries in recent years underlines the importance countries place on these RTAs. Selected information on RTAs by country is presented in the tables below.

This paper maps and examines competition-related provisions in seventy-four regional trade agreements (RTAs). The template used for the mapping is based on previous work done to map competition-related provisions in RTAs and on recent thoughtful critiques of those approaches. The mapping undertaken in this paper applies to all competition-related provisions of the RTAs and not just to the competition policy chapter. This distinction is important because there are salient competition provisions in the other chapters of regional trade agreements which affect the conditions of competition among suppliers, undertakings and enterprises that operate in the markets of RTA members.