Technical barriers to trade
How Regional Trade Agreements Deal with Disputes Concerning their TBT Provisions?
This paper investigates how RTAs treat disputes concerning their TBT provisions in particular whether they treat them differently from other types of dispute and how they deal with any potential overlap with the WTO when the substantive obligations of the RTA and the WTO TBT Agreement are the same (or similar).
International Standards and the WTO TBT Agreement
The WTO TBT Agreement obliges governments to use international standards as a basis for regulation yet leaves a degree of flexibility with respect to the choice of standard and the manner of its use. This interplay between obligation and flexibility has given rise to tension in various fora of the WTO. This paper brings together these three distinct strands of WTO work to illustrate core aspects of the international standards debate at the WTO. In our analysis we first briefly outline the nature of the discipline in the TBT Agreement itself; next we describe where and how the discussion arises in the WTO; and finally explore some implications of governance of international standard setting. We propose that greater regulatory alignment could be achieved through a renewed focus on the procedures of setting international standards (the how) and greater emphasis on robust technical/scientific underpinnings of such standards (the what).
Trade Policy Uncertainty as Barrier to Trade
This paper studies the effects of trade policy uncertainty on the extensive and the intensive margins of trade for a sample of 149 exporters at the HS6 digit level. We measure trade policy uncertainty as the gap between binding tariff commitments under trade agreements (multilateral and regional agreements) and applied tariffs- what is also known as tariffs’ water. Our results show that trade policy uncertainty is an important barrier to export. On average the elimination of water increases the probability of exporting by 12 percent. A one percent decrease of water also increases export volumes by one percent. We also find that the negative impact of trade policy uncertainty is higher for countries with low quality of institutions and in the presence of global value chains. Finally our findings show that on average trade policy uncertainty is equivalent to a level of tariffs between 1.7 and 8.7 percentage points.