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1. Reflections on WTO Reform: Lecture series by Ignacio Garcia Bercero

Author:
Ignacio Garcia Bercero
Publication Date:
01-2025
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
LSE IDEAS
Abstract:
This special edition of our Expert Analysis presents four lectures (edited for publication) on World Trade Organization reform delivered by the author at LSE IDEAS during June-November 2022 and concluding in May 2023. The paper ends on a postscript reflecting on the perspectives on the different issues discussed in the lectures following the outcome of the 13th Ministerial Conference of the WTO in February-March 2024, as well as the November 2024 re-election of Donald Trump—on the basis of a disruptive trade policy agenda.
Topic:
Reform, Trade Policy, Donald Trump, and WTO
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. The Rise and Decline of the Liberal World Order and the Multilateral Trade System: A Critical-Constructivist Synthesis to International Regime Analysis

Author:
Serdar Altay
Publication Date:
06-2024
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
This article devises an analytical framework that synthesizes neo-Gramscian and social constructivist perspectives to dissect international regimes amid global hegemonic shifts. It portrays regimes as intersubjective constructs with unique social purposes within the broader hegemonic fabric, shaped by dominant ideologies and power distributions. The study examines the transition of the trade regime from General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to World Trade Organization (WTO) through the Uruguay Round (1986-1994) and the Doha Round’s deadlock since 2001. The article posits that the Uruguay Round marked a pivotal hegemonic transformation, transitioning the regime from embedded liberalism to neoliberalism by transforming its social purpose, norms, and generative grammar. Yet, this shift, which precipitated a legitimacy crisis within the WTO and was exacerbated by the Doha Round’s failure to regenerate neoliberal hegemony with a fresh synthesis of free trade and sustainable development, arguably rendered the WTO directionless and contributed to the fragmentation of global trade governance amidst emerging regional pacts and varied ideological visions of economic liberalism.
Topic:
Liberalism, WTO, International Order, Critical Theory, Social Constructivism, and International Regimes
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. New Approaches and Challenges Regarding Trade, Climate Action, and the WTO

Author:
Sunayana Sasmal
Publication Date:
12-2024
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
Abstract:
The report examines the intricate relationship between climate change and international trade, emphasizing the necessity for global cooperation to tackle the climate crisis in a sustainable and equitable manner. Climate change poses a significant global challenge, affecting economic, social, and political aspects of life worldwide. While effective resolution requires international cooperation, achieving so is complex due to inadequate action, the distribution of the burdens of regulatory costs, and the potential of free riding—a situation reminiscent of the tragedy of the commons. Efforts for cooperation in the environmental field have included multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), from the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to the 2015 Paris Agreement. However, political discord has hindered progress, particularly in linking climate action with trade governance within the World Trade Organization (WTO). Tensions between the developed and the less developed regarding historical contributions to climate change and how such historical contributions qualify current levels of responsibility, inadequate climate finance despite repeated promises, and the technology divide, further complicate this issue. Limited technology transfers and the lack of enforceability of related commitments have led to growing resentment and distrust among WTO members, amid the rising number of climate-related trade measures.
Topic:
Climate Change, International Trade and Finance, and WTO
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. Government Procurement, Financial Services, and Environment: Linkages and Implications for the EU and Brazil

Author:
Adeet Dobhal and Lucas Moreira Jimenez
Publication Date:
05-2024
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
Abstract:
The relationship between trade agreements and the environment is increasingly a priority for policymakers and civil society today. However, some of the disciplines covered by modern trade agreements have not received enough attention when it comes to their potential impact on the environment. Financial services and government procurement are two such areas, even though they are increasingly consequential topics for international trade policy and negotiations. This blind spot merits greater consideration as the connections definitely exist: the regulation of government procurement and financial services can have positive or negative implications for environmental outcomes on the ground, which makes understanding these links a crucial task. Engaging in this very task, this report focuses on the EU-Mercosur Trade Agreement, with a particular attention to the case of Brazil. Using the Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) as an analytical base, the report examines recent and relevant trade agreements entered into by Brazil and the EU to contextualize and understand the links between environmental protection on the one hand and government procurement and financial services on the other. The insights generated are then applied to the analysis of the government procurement and financial services chapters of the EUMTA, in an effort to understand how these rules affect parties’ ability to regulate in pursuit of environmental outcomes.
Topic:
Environment, Treaties and Agreements, Trade, WTO, and Procurement
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. Implementation of the WTO Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement: Identification of Reform Needs and Development Policy Measures

Author:
Axel Berger, Ann Margret Bolmer, Florian Gitt, Zoryana Olekseyuk, and Marius Metz
Publication Date:
01-2023
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)
Abstract:
More than 110 Members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), many of them developing countries and least-developed countries (LDCs), are negotiating a plurilateral Agreement on Investment Facilitation for Development (IFD). In contract to existing bilateral investment treaties that establish sweeping rules on investment protection and liberalisation, the IFD Agreement aims at increasing the transparency, predictability and efficiency of investment frameworks as well as improving inter-governmental coordination and international cooperation on investment matters. In view of the fact that WTO Members aim at concluding the negotiations by mid-2023, discussions are under way on how the IFD Agreement can successfully be implemented in developing countries, and LDCs in particular. The IFD Agreement includes a comprehensive section on Special and Differential Treatment, which grants developing countries and LDCs longer timeframes as well as technical assistance and capacity development to support implementation. The Agreement also foresees so-called needs assessments at the country level to evaluate countries’ readiness and support needs to implement the IFD Agreement. While such needs assessments have been extensively used in the context of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), we lack insights into how such needs assessments can be operationalised in the context of investment facilitation and what kind of imple¬mentation challenges are prevalent, in particular in LDCs. To assess implementation gaps, barriers to successful implementation as well as national and international support actions, we conducted pilot needs assessments covering a selected group of IFD Agreement measures with a broad range of stakeholders in three LDCs, namely Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), Togo and Zambia. Our pilots indicate that 13 selected provisions of the IFD Agreement have not been sufficiently implemented across the three LDCs. In particular, 64 per cent of analysed provisions have only partially been implement, while the rest have not been implemented at all. These findings underline that, in order to benefit from the IFD Agreement, LDCs need substantial implementation support from the international community. The most striking, commonly identified barriers hindering the full implementation are lack of cooperation and coordination among investment-competent agencies, poor information management for investors as well as limited digitalisation and automatisation. To overcome these barriers, nationally identified actions may focus mainly on the creation of a single information portal for foreign investors and a single-window system to improve authorisation procedures, as well as a clarification of mandates and functions of relevant ministries and institutions. Our research also underlines the importance of a whole-of-government and multi-stakeholder approach. The establishment of a National Investment Facilitation Committee may prove to be an effective instrument to ensure coordination and communication between involved stakeholders. International support should complement national actions with technical assistance and capacity development in investment-related topics, improving information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures and digitalised processes, as well as fostering the international exchange of best practices. Our pilot needs assessments emphasise that the WTO Secretariat and the negotiating Members should strengthen outreach activities to promote knowledge about the WTO IFD Agreement among national-level stakeholders. In general, our pilots underline that needs assessments are an important instrument for identifying persistent implementation gaps and tailoring technical assistance and capacity development to the demands of Members, especially LDCs.
Topic:
Development, Reform, Investment, WTO, and Development Policy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. The Conundrum of the Essential Security Exception: Can the WTO resolve the GATT Article XXI crisis and save the dispute settlement mechanism?

Author:
Stephen Kho, Yujin McNamara, Sarah Kirwin, and Brooke Davies
Publication Date:
11-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
Abstract:
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is in an existential crisis. Ever since the United States began blocking the appointment of new Appellate Body members, the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism began slowly breaking down. As the Appellate Body lost its ability to function, WTO Members realized that they were empowered to appeal disputes they had lost at the panel level “into the void,” thereby preventing resolution. This, in turn, resulted in the filing of fewer disputes as Members instead started taking trade matters into their own hands. At the same time, Members began to more freely ignore their WTO obligations, knowing that if challenged, they could simply appeal adverse decisions “into the void” while still boasting their compliance with WTO rules because the dispute settlement mechanism would not have rendered a final decision based on a procedural technicality. Some WTO Members are now actively attempting to resuscitate the faltering dispute settlement system. Over the past year, efforts to negotiate a solution to the Appellate Body impasse have intensified between the United States and other Members, so much so that WTO Director- General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala recently suggested that dispute settlement reform could be one of the main “outcomes” of the upcoming 13th WTO Ministerial Conference.2 However, this is easier said than done. Despite recent progress in the reform discussions, the United States has seen to it that a key sticking point in the negotiations has become the justiciability of Article XXI(b) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1994 (GATT).3 Article XXI(b) is an exception that allows WTO Members to legally deviate from their trade obligations when necessary for the protection of their “essential security interests”.4 As with the Appellate Body impasse, the United States stands largely alone in taking a hard- line position that Article XXI(b) must be wholly self-judging and thus non-justiciable under the WTO. In the view of the United States, Members may unilaterally determine for themselves whether their actions are taken for purposes of their essential security interests, or, in other words, whether they self-qualify to use the Article XXI(b) exception to justify what would otherwise be a WTO violation.5
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, National Security, WTO, and Disputes
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

7. The World Bank, the IMF, and the GATT/WTO: Which institution most supported trade reform in developing economies?

Author:
Douglas A. Irwin
Publication Date:
12-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)
Abstract:
The 1980s and 1990s saw a policy revolution in developing countries in which many highly protected (if not closed) economies were opened to world trade. These reforms were largely undertaken unilaterally, but international economic institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization supported these efforts. This paper examines the ways in which these institutions promoted, or failed to promote, trade policy reform during this pivotal period.
Topic:
Development, World Bank, Reform, Trade, IMF, and WTO
Political Geography:
Global Focus

8. The WTO and vaccine supply chain resilience during a pandemic

Author:
Chad P. Bown
Publication Date:
09-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)
Abstract:
Cross-border supply chains and international trade enabled the manufacturing and delivery of billions of vaccine doses to inoculate the world against COVID-19. At the same time, the pandemic revealed how the World Trade Organization (WTO) must change to become more useful in the face of a public health emergency. This paper describes the market failures—especially on the supply side—justifying the domestic subsidies and contracting arrangements used to accelerate vaccine research and development and to increase the scale of vaccine production to save lives, livelihoods, and economic activity during a pandemic. It highlights tradeoffs associated with the US subsidies and the priority-rated contracts written through the Defense Production Act under Operation Warp Speed. This case study reveals a rich environment in which cross-border supply chains exacerbate input shortages in ways that constrain vaccine production, highlighting the need for the WTO to embrace new forms of international policy coordination for pandemic preparedness and response. As part of a pandemic treaty, the paper proposes a plurilateral agreement on vaccine supply chain resilience that would include novel and enforceable disciplines for export restrictions, provisions to trigger coordinated subsidies across countries to jointly scale up vaccine output- and input-production capacity, and market surveillance initiatives on supply chain transparency.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Vaccine, COVID-19, WTO, and Supply Chains
Political Geography:
Global Focus

9. WTO 2025: Restoring binding dispute settlement

Author:
Alan Wm. Wolff
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)
Abstract:
Binding dispute settlement—the ability to obtain a final judgment of whether a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has acted inconsistently with its obligations—was the defining attribute of the WTO as created in 1995. Global commerce thrived on having the certainty provided by its taking place within this system. For well over a decade, the United States had complained that the dispute settlement system was undermining the trade remedies—antidumping, countervailing duties against subsidies, and safeguard actions against injurious imports—that were allowed under the WTO’s rules. When a populist US administration assumed office in 2017, it blocked appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body. Today, the WTO dispute settlement system has become balkanized. The European Union and a number of other countries have banded together to put into place an alternative mechanism. Outside this system are the other two-thirds of the WTO members, including the United States. For most WTO members, no definitive result can be reached as to whether WTO obligations have been violated, as there is no assurance that WTO dispute settlement will be binding for them. This paper addresses how to reconstruct a system that the United States could join that would be broadly acceptable to others. It sets out a wide range of elements for negotiators to consider to rebuild the WTO dispute settlement system and make WTO agreements enforceable again.
Topic:
Economics, Trade, WTO, and Disputes
Political Geography:
Global Focus

10. WTO 2025: Enhancing global trade intelligence

Author:
Alan Wm. Wolff
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)
Abstract:
International trade flows based on information. Is the foreign market open? What are the conditions for entry? Are there customs duties to be paid and other regulations that need to be satisfied? Businesses thrive on getting as much certainty as they can find, and this requires reliable information. Is the competition subsidized? Are the competitors favored state-owned companies? During the pandemic, governments needed to know if food and medical supplies were going to be available from foreign sources and, most importantly, how available vaccines would be as most of the world’s countries could not produce any. Effective public policy cannot be made in the dark. The World Trade Organization, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade before it, were founded with the idea of providing transparency. But more is needed to understand why trade is taking place, and even more important, when it is not, why not?
Topic:
Economics, Markets, Trade, and WTO
Political Geography:
Global Focus