Public policy makers in Canada should expect the US to object to the extension of protection to EU GIs in the CETA. The expected gains made in other areas of the CETA for agreeing to protect EU GIs need to be weighed carefully against the potential cost of trade actions through NAFTA. The NAFTA...

The Canadian Farm Products Agencies Act (2012) requires that comparative advantage be used to guide the allocation of new quota under supply management. This requirement, however, has not been met in practice. Agricultural economists have proposed several ways of making this legal requirement...

Negotiators from developed countries pushed hard for the inclusion of the TRIPS Agreement in the WTO set of agreements because it was viewed as a potentially effective method of coercing developing countries to strengthen their protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). We investigate...

Food safety regulations limit trade in bioproducts. Every country, however, has a duty to protect its citizens from food safety hazards. If risks are increasing under an existing food safety system then a strengthening of the regulatory regime can be justified, with the inevitable negative...

Movement toward the objective of undistorted world agricultural markets has been set back by the lapse since 2008 of the WTO Doha Round negotiations. In the absence of a new agreement, constraints on distortionary agricultural domestic support remain lax. One might have expected policies of...

I provide a stocktaking on the profile of regional trade agreements in the global trading system over the last decade focusing heavily on the period since the 2008 financial crisis and relying heavily on WTO notifications. Regional agreements cover both regional trade agreements and broader...