This publication highlights how the WTO’s Agreements on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and the work of their related Committees promote opportunities for regulatory cooperation among governments and ease trade frictions. It demonstrates how members’ notification of draft measures, harmonisation of measures with international standards, discussion of specific trade concerns and other practices help to facilitate global trade in goods. The study also makes recommendations on how to benefit further from the transparency and cooperation opportunities provided by the TBT and SPS Agreements.

The WTO plays an important role in supporting efforts to achieve international regulatory cooperation (IRC) and to facilitate trade. First, the WTO provides a multilateral framework for trade among its 164 members, with a view to ensuring that trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely as possible. Second, the WTO’s Agreements provide important legal disciplines, helping to promote good regulatory practice and IRC at the domestic level as a means of reducing unnecessary barriers to trade. This publication highlights how the WTO’s Agreements on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and the work of their related Committees promote opportunities for regulatory cooperation among governments and ease trade frictions. It demonstrates how members’ notification of draft measures, harmonisation of measures with international standards, discussion of specific trade concerns and other practices help to facilitate global trade in goods. The study also makes recommendations on how to benefit further from the transparency and cooperation opportunities provided by the TBT and SPS Agreements.

Presents transparency as a key tool for managing trade disputes on regulatory barriers between WTO Members.

This companion volume to An Introduction to the WTO Agreements looks at how the WTO agreements represent progress over the GATT rules they have replaced. The author also analyses their deficiencies and imbalances from the point of view of the developing countries. And he proposes detailed changes (and strategies) which, in his view, the countries of the South ought now to be putting forward in the next round of negotiations on trade and related issues which have already commenced.

Trade in services, far more than trade in goods, is affected by a variety of domestic regulations, ranging from qualification and licensing requirements in professional services to pro-competitive regulation in telecommunications services. Experience shows that the quality of regulation strongly influences the consequences of trade liberalization. WTO members have agreed that a central task in the ongoing services negotiations will be to develop a set of rules to ensure that domestic regulations support rather than impede trade liberalization. Since these rules are bound to have a profound impact on the evolution of policy, particularly in developing countries, it is important that they be conducive to economically rational policy-making. This book addresses two central questions: What impact can international trade rules on services have on the exercise of domestic regulatory sovereignty? And how can services negotiations be harnessed to promote and consolidate domestic policy reform across highly diverse sectors? The book, with contributions from several of the world's leading experts in the field, explores a range of rule-making challenges arising at this policy interface, in areas such as transparency, standards and the adoption of a necessity test for services trade. Contributions also provide an in-depth look at these issues in the key areas of accountancy, energy, finance, health, telecommunications and transportation services.

Against the backdrop of the recent trend towards megaregional trade initiatives, this book addresses the most topical issues that lie at the intersection of law and technology. By assessing international law and the political economy, the contributing authors offer an enhanced understanding of the challenges of diverging regulatory approaches to innovation.

This research explores how multilateralism in trade has worked over the past twenty years - and provides some lessons about how it can work in the future. It describes the WTO's achievements across a number of key areas, including: strengthening the institutional foundations of the trade system; widening its membership and increasing participation; deepening trade integration through lower barriers and stronger rules; improving transparency and policy dialogue; strengthening dispute settlement; expanding cooperation with other international organizations; and enhancing public outreach. It concludes that the WTO has achieved much over its first twenty years but the success of the WTO has inevitably given rise to new challenges.

This volume contains a collection of studies examining trade-related issues negotiated in regional trade agreements (RTAs) and how RTAs are related to the WTO's rules. While previous work has focused on subsets of RTAs, these studies are based on what is probably the largest dataset used to date, and highlight key issues that have been negotiated in all RTAs notified to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). New rules within RTAs are compared to rules agreed upon by WTO members. The extent of their divergences and the potential implications for parties to RTAs, as well as for WTO members that are not parties to RTAs, are examined. This volume makes an important contribution to the current debate on the role of the WTO in regulating international trade and how WTO rules relate to new rules being developed by RTAs.