About the WTO

In 2011, the WTO received 25 new notifications, little change on the previous year, involving 15 regional trade agreements (RTAs). Slightly more than half the new RTAs were between developed and developing partners, extending a trend that has emerged in recent years. The Americas was the region with the highest number – eight.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which had been set up over 40 years earlier to oversee the rules of trade. The aim of the WTO is to ensure that trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely as possible. Whereas the GATT only dealt with trade in goods, the WTO covers trade in goods and services as well as trade-related intellectual property rights. It also oversees strengthened rules for the settlement of disputes between members.

Given its abundant natural resources and accelerating consumer-driven growth, sub-Saharan Africa has much to offer investors and traders. Yet the region remains weakly integrated into global and regional value chains, due to, among other things, geographical disadvantages, infrastructural shortcomings, high transport costs and difficult-to-access market intelligence – all of which add to the cost of trade. While not an insignificant player in international business and trade circles, South Africa is facing shrinking demand in its traditional export markets and has to plot a new economic course after decades of overreliance on commodity exports and value-added imports. This chapter looks at how a market selection tool, the Decision Support Model (DSM), can streamline the process of identifying export opportunities, particularly at an intra-regional level. Covering both products and services, and adaptable to different countries’ circumstances, the DSM simplifies market selection decisions by pinpointing both short- and longer-term business opportunities in high-potential sectors, while also exposing market access barriers that could become the focus of specific efficiency-enhancing interventions. In this way, the DSM can be a valuable aid to trade facilitation.

Les quatre rapports établis par le Secrétariat au nom du Directeur général ont montré que, malgré la crise financière et économique, les Membres de l'OMC ont généralement continué à résister aux pressions protectionnistes en 2011. Pourtant, ces pressions augmentent, de même que les risques pesant sur l'économie mondiale. Les perspectives du commerce mondial se sont assombries, et il est probable que les exportations mondiales augmenteront moins que prévu.

L’année 2015 a été particulièrement chargée pour l’Organe d’appel, qui a présenté onze rapports dans sept affaires distinctes. À la fin de 2015, il avait distribué au total 138 rapports. Trois procédures d’arbitrage concernant le délai raisonnable pour la mise en oeuvre des recommandations et décisions de l’Organe de règlement des différends (ORD) ont été menées à bien en 2015. L’ORD a reconduit deux membres de l’Organe d’appel, Ujal Singh Bhatia (Inde) et Thomas Graham (États-Unis), pour un deuxième mandat de quatre ans.

My journey to becoming a member of the Appellate Body began in Itu, a small town in the countryside of the state of São Paulo, in Brazil, a former Portuguese colony – where I was born. Portuguese traditions remain alive in the activities of the Brazilian state, especially in the judicial branch. Tribunals and judges unconsciously act as if they were still the sovereign’s representatives, and install their courts in buildings that resemble real palaces. Lawyers and the general public address judges as ‘your excellency’, and when they appeal to the courts they do so as if the judges were granting them a favour, instead of securing a right that derives from the constitution or the law.

This chapter evaluates the extent to which changes in tariffs and in international prices were transmitted into consumer prices in Tunisia over the period 2000– 2008. A pass-through equation is estimated using sectoral panel data at the retail product level and controlling for unobserved sectoral heterogeneity. The main results show that, on average, tariff pass-through (TPT) is 10 per cent and it varies across sectors. In particular, agricultural products seem to be driving the results. In summary, the change in Tunisian tariffs has affected local prices, but the effect is lower in magnitude than that found for other developing countries. This is in part due to imperfect competition and state interventions by means of subsidies and price controls that prevent the full transmission of changes in international prices. This research suggests that, for Tunisia, trade facilitation measures and sectoral actions to facilitate the business environment could positively impact on the passthrough effect and that reductions in border prices could have higher effects on retail prices, which, in turn, contribute to increase domestic welfare and generate inclusive development.

Two constants mark the theory and practice of discrimination in trade relations. The first is that it has always been controversial among economists, many of whom share the misgivings that Adam Smith (1776: 460) expressed when he compared preferential trading arrangements to “[t]he sneaking arts of underling tradesmen” who “make it a rule to employ chiefly their own customers.” In an anticipation of the argument that these arrangements are a second-best alternative to the first-best option of non-discriminatory liberalization, he declared “a great trader purchases his goods always where they are cheapest and best, without regard to any little interest of this kind.” Viner (1950: 44) elaborated upon that argument when he distinguished between the trade-diverting and trade-creating effects of customs unions, each of which originated in a discriminatory agreement’s twin effects of “shift[ing] sources of supply … either to lower- or higher-cost sources.”

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the key features of the provisions of Part III, Sections 1 to 5, of the TRIPS Agreement entitled ‘Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights’. This Part of the Agreement elaborates in 21 articles the enforcement procedures that members have to make available to permit prompt and effective action against infringements of IPRs covered by the TRIPS Agreement.