A propos de l’OMC

Using the influence-driven approach to endogenous trade-policy determination, we show how a free-trade agreement (FTA) with rules of origin can work as a device to compensate losers from trade liberalization. The FTA constructed in this paper is characterized by external tariff structures that are negatively correlated across member countries, ensuring efficiency gains and, through reduced average protection, compatibility with the multilateral trading system's requirements. It is also politically viable, and we demonstrate that, in the countries concerned, governments are willing to include its formation in the political agenda in spite of the fact that, in equilibrium, political contributions from producer lobbies decline after the agreement.

The United Nations' post--2015- development agenda is taking shape. Like its predecessor the Millennium Development Goals, the post--2015- agenda will reshape development policy priorities for governments and non-governmental actors alike, in many cases galvanising new attention, thinking, and financing to tackle the priorities it identifies. This essay reviews the historical and ongoing role played by trade in sustained high growth and human development progress, and makes the case that the post--2015- development agenda should include considerations related to trade rules and supply-side capacity. Given the strong links between trade-led growth, economic upgrading, and poverty reduction, the paper argues that trade led economic growth must be prioritised in the post--2015- development agenda.

This paper analyses the results of the financial services negotiations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) at the World Trade Organization (WTO). It shows that the negotiations have contributed to more stable and transparent policy regimes in many developing and transition countries. The wide range of market access and non-discrimination commitments should advance the process of progressive liberalization. The commitments do not compromise the ability of countries to pursue sound macroeconomic and regulatory policies. However, other aspects of the outcome do raise some concerns. First, there has been less emphasis on the introduction of competition through allowing new entry than on allowing (or maintaining) foreign equity participation and protecting the position of incumbents. Secondly, even where immediate introduction of competition was not deemed feasible, not much advantage has been taken of the GATS to lend credibility to liberalization programmes by precommitting to future market access.

The WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) is a plurilateral Agreement, meaning that it comprises only a subset of the full Membership of the WTO. Currently, a number of WTO Members that are not Parties to the Agreement either are actively seeking accession to it, have commitments to accede to the GPA in their respective WTO accession protocols or are, on their own initiative, looking at the potential pros and cons of accession. In this context, there is a need for factual information concerning the potential consequences of GPA accession, and a framework to assess related benefits and costs. Of interest is both the systemic value of such accessions – i.e. the value they will add to the extent of market access commitments under the Agreement – and their potential benefits and costs for individual acceding Parties. This Working Paper introduces new sources of information relevant to these topics (principally, the statistical reports that have been circulated recently by GPA Parties) and shows their relevance to and usefulness in assessing the above-noted matters. The Paper presents estimates of the size of potential market access gains from pending and possible future GPA accessions, based on simple extrapolations from the data sources identified. Next, the Paper shows how the same data sources can assist in throwing light on the potential benefits and costs of GPA accession for individual WTO Members/countries contemplating accession. The latter use of the data is developed in the context of a more general discussion of the benefits and costs of GPA accession for individual WTO Members, also drawing on existing literature, qualitative aspects and "insights from the field" (i.e. our own work in advising and conducting seminars for such countries and other WTO Members).

While conditions in trade finance markets returned to normality in the main routes of trade, the structural difficulties of poor countries in accessing trade finance have not disappeared – and might have been worsened during and after the global financial crisis. There is a consistent flow of information indicating that trade finance markets have remained characterized by a greater selectivity in risk-taking and flight to "quality" customers. In that environment, the lower end of the market has been struggling to obtain affordable finance, with the smaller companies in the smaller, poorer countries most affected. In an area where statistics are difficult to find, this paper looks at recent available information and provides background on the persistent and significant market gaps for trade finance in developing countries, notably in Africa and developing Asia. It discusses various initiatives in which the WTO and partner institutions are involved to alleviate in part this situation.

In 2003, the WTO General Council decided to provide an additional legal pathway for WTO Members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector to access medicines. Two years later, in 2005, WTO Members unanimously agreed to give this mechanism, often referred to as the "Paragraph 6 System", a permanent legal status when they adopted the Protocol Amending the TRIPS Agreement. The implementation and use of the additional pro-public health flexibilities provided by the System is optional, not mandatory. To take advantage of them, as of July 2015, 51 WTO Members have adopted specific implementing measures with a variable degree of detail and complexity which incorporate the Paragraph 6 System in their respective legal frameworks and provide the basis for them to act either as exporter or as importers, or as both. This represents almost a third of the WTO Membership, and the predominant bulk of existing pharmaceutical exporters. Given that, unlike other flexibilities in the TRIPS Agreement, the Paragraph 6 System was devised as a new mechanism without previous domestic experience to draw upon, there seems to be an exceptional need for an in-depth discussion of how it has been implemented at country level to which this paper attempts to respond. There is, indeed, often limited knowledge in the policy and procurement communities about the wide range of specific measures that have been introduced in many major exporters of medicines and the importance of this information both from a practical point of view, to facilitate exports of needed medicines, and from a policy point of view, to understand the implementation of this novel tool for access to medicines. To contribute to a better understanding of how the System has been implemented in practice, this paper surveys domestic measures that WTO Members have put in place. By doing so, it can inform the broader dialogue about access to medicines and provide practical information for procurement programmes. It can also put a valuable source of information and inspiration at the disposal of those Members who are yet in the process of considering whether and how best to implement the Paragraph 6 System in their domestic legal framework. While the survey illustrates that a robust framework supportive of the export of generic medicines to meet public health needs has been put in place by a significant number of WTO Members, there is an obvious need to move a step forward and engage in a substantive review of the System, including if and how better, more frequent use could be made of it. To conclude, the paper therefore offers some elements for reflection regarding the way forward in order to support the functioning of the Paragraph 6 System.

The gains from trade depend on the reallocation of resources, including labour, across firms and sectors. However, workers are unlikely to be fully mobile since there are barriers to sectoral and geographical mobility due to social reasons such as family or existing private and professional networks. If these barriers depend on specific characteristics of workers, such as education, gender or race, this has important implications for inequality.

Natural resources account for 20% of world trade, and dominate the exports of many countries. Policy is used to manipulate both international and domestic prices of resources, yet this policy is largely outside the disciplines of the WTO. The instruments used include export taxes, price controls, production quotas, and domestic producer and consumer taxes (equivalent to trade taxes if no domestic production is possible). We review the literature, and argue that the policy equilibrium is inefficient. This inefficiency is exacerbated by market failure in long run contracts for exploration and development of natural resources. Properly coordinated policy reforms offer an avenue to resource exporting and importing countries to overcome these inefficiencies and obtain mutual gains.

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.

Most specific trade concerns (STCs), which are raised before the WTO Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Committee), disappear from the TBT Committee’s meeting agendas without escalating into formal disputes. At the same time, a relatively small number of TBT-related disputes have been subject to the WTO dispute settlement procedures. By examining the practice of raising STCs and the relationship between STCs and disputes, the paper emphasises the role of STCs as a trade tension resolution mechanism.