WTO accessions

On 18 April 2019 the WTO circulated the panel report in the case brought by the United States in “China - Tariff Rate Quotas for Certain Agricultural Products” (DS517).

Over the past seven decades, since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was established in 1947, there has been a phenomenal increase in international trade in goods, largely due to sustained efforts by the world’s main trading nations to reduce and eliminate tariff barriers in a multilaterally orchestrated manner. This publication reviews how the procedures and practices relating to tariff negotiations and renegotiations have evolved over this time. In particular, this new edition recounts how negotiations to expand the duty-free coverage of the Information Technology Agreement were concluded and provides an account of tariff renegotiations regarding successive enlargements of the European Union. It also covers tariff negotiations for the accession of a number of new members to the WTO, such as China and Russia. This book will be of particular interest to negotiators, members of government, trade ministries, economists and academics specialized in trade policy.

Besides facilitating access to the world market, WTO accession negotiations entail a process of domestic reforms that are expected to improve the supply side of acceding economies. However, measuring the actual impact of accession remains an empirical debate.

The WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) established the first multilateral understanding of what constitutes a standard for ‘adequate’ and ‘effective’ protection of intellectual property rights, and established a new mechanism for monitoring and reviewing how these standards are met. The policy and legal framework defined by the TRIPS Agreement has, in the two decades since it entered into force, progressively gained acceptance as a legitimate, balanced and transparent set of standards. Since then, however, two parallel sets of negotiations have revisited the standards defined by TRIPS: the multilateral WTO accession negotiations, and bilateral and regional trade negotiations outside the WTO. In each case, TRIPS standards have been further elaborated, and timelines for their implementation altered, in a manner that produces a layering of rules upon the foundation of TRIPS. However, the institutional, legal and policy implications of these two lines of development contrast sharply. This chapter reviews the main lines of development of rules relating to intellectual property in the accession processes, and contrasts these with the parallel developments outside the WTO. It concludes with an analysis of the policy and practical lessons that can be derived from contrasting these two processes.

The book you are about to close picked up on the evolving discussion on accessions and trade multilateralism. The first book on the subject, WTO Accessions and Trade Multilateralism: Case Studies and Lessons from the WTO at Twenty, looked back. It took stock of two decades of accessions to the WTO, their welfare and development outcomes, the resulting improvements to market access, and their contribution to domestic reforms and to the rules-based multilateral trading system. It shone a powerful light on the GATT/WTO accession procedure – a process hitherto viewed as lacking transparency and complicated by its esoteric vocabulary and apparent detachment from the day-to-day conduct of trade.

WTO obligations, including notification requirements, and specific accession commitments are complex. Most of them become effective from the date of WTO membership. From a centralized accession process, new members now suddenly have to adapt to a decentralized WTO procedures and participate in parallel in its multiple bodies. The twenty years of post-accession experience of Article XII members suggests that many, especially least-developed countries (LDCs), have faced major implementation challenges until a system of post-accession support was introduced recently. This chapter reviews the Post-Accession Support Platform (PASP), a framework developed by the WTO Secretariat to facilitate the transition from acceding economy to full-fledged WTO member. The PASP offers individual post-accession implementation strategies, technical assistance and capacity-building, best international practices, a dedicated website and internal Secretariat procedures that can be used to support new WTO members. The chapter reviews the use of the PASP by two recently acceded LDCs – Afghanistan and Liberia – and finds early signs of improved effectiveness in the WTO post-accession transition process.

Trade multilateralism in the twenty-first century faces a serious test as weakness in the global economy and fast-paced technological changes create a challenging environment for world trade. This book examines how an updated and robust rules-based multilateral framework, anchored in the WTO, remains indispensable to maximizing the benefits of global economic integration and to reviving world trade. By examining recent accessions to the WTO, it reveals how the growing membership of the WTO has helped to support domestic reforms and to strengthen the rules-based framework of the WTO. It argues that the new realities of the twenty-first century require an upgrade to the architecture of the multilateral trading system. By erecting its ‘upper floors’ on the foundation of existing trade rules, the WTO can continue to adapt to a fast-changing environment and to maximize the benefits brought about by its ever-expanding membership.

Accessions to the World Trade Organization (WTO) generate large amounts of data accumulated during accession negotiations and subsequent domestic reforms. Owing to differences in the structure of acceding economies, accession commitments vary across recently acceded, or Article XII, members, in the number of tariff lines bound, the level of bindings and the various accession-specific commitments and obligations. The depth of commitments and extent of post-accession implementation influence the effectiveness of benefits derived by new members from WTO accession. In spite of the generally positive economic performance exhibited by all Article XII members, disparities exist in their country-specific economic performance in terms of trade, foreign direct investment (FDI) and gross domestic product (GDP) growth. This chapter analyses the impact and depth of accession commitments to assess the economic effects of WTO accession. It explores how the data from accessions acquis can assist policy-makers in implementing structural reforms and integrating their countries into regional and global value chains. An Accession Commitment Index is proposed as a basis for a statistical exploration of the impact of WTO accession on a series of variables related to economic growth. Using an extension of the difference-in-difference methodological approach, the chapter finds that WTO accession generally has a positive and significant impact on the acceding economy’s trade and economic performance. The results also show that the impact of WTO membership on the trade/GDP ratio in developing countries is significantly higher than in previous studies.

This chapter considers political, commercial and legal aspects of accession negotiations and the compromises by all parties involved to make accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) a reality. Using the negotiations on the accessions of the Russian Federation and Samoa as case studies, this chapter analyses how political constraints, economic interests and legal commitments affected the course of the negotiations. In the case of the Russian Federation, the focus was on certain investment programmes in the automotive industry that were deemed inconsistent with the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs). Agreement on these measures required prolonged negotiations, including at ministerial levels, to find a satisfactory solution for all parties involved. In the case of Samoa, attention was focused on the appropriate level of flexibility to be granted to a least-developed country (LDC), as the expansion of LDC membership is a priority for the Organization, in accordance with the Guidelines on LDCs’ accessions. The chapter concludes that the experience of accession negotiations has helped to define domestic reform in acceding members, clarify the application of WTO provisions in practice, upgrade regional integration frameworks and counter negative political pressures. These lessons can be used in negotiations by other acceding economies and constitute important building blocks of the upper floors of the international trading system.

Although the private sector is not, in most cases, directly involved in negotiations for accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), its needs and positions are addressed through consultative mechanisms organized at the national level by WTO members. These mechanisms represent a two-way information channel: the relevant authorities can obtain the foundations to formulate and defend national negotiating positions, while the private sector has an avenue to present sectoral interests as well as any relevant trade concerns. In acknowledging the influence of the private sector, the objective of this chapter is to examine the existing public-private consultation mechanisms in selected WTO members, as well as the evidence of private sector interests in recent reports of accession working parties. The analysis suggests that the influence of the business sector is embedded in accession protocols. Accession agreements include results obtained through trade policy consultation mechanisms, which vary in the degree of formality and sophistication. Ideally, the consultation and outreach mechanisms established by acceding governments to promote support for WTO accession should be strengthened throughout the WTO membership. Such mechanisms should continue to function once accessions have been completed to support the implementation of commitments, set further negotiating priorities and participate in trade policy reviews and dispute settlement. The support and contributions of the private sector were instrumental to successfully achieve recent multilateral results, notably the Trade Facilitation Agreement and the expansion of the Information Technology Agreement.