This paper illustrates how the work of the WTO's standing committees is fuelling regulatory cooperation between WTO members, and inspiring RTA negotiators. We explore, as a case study, how the WTO TBT Committee has shaped provisions on international standards in RTAs, and focus on the extent to...

Currency devaluation resembles subsidy and dumping in terms of its impact on global trade – it grants price advantages to exporting companies. Unlike subsidy and dumping, however, multilateral regulation of currency manipulation, which is principally exercised by the IMF, is far from...

Economic theory has made considerable progress in explaining why sovereign countries cooperate in trade. Central to most theories of trade cooperation are issues of self-enforcement: The threat of reprisal by an aggrieved party maintains the initial balance of concessions and prevents...

This paper is a contribution to the literature on rational design of trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an incomplete contract among sovereign states. Incomplete contracts contain gaps. Ex post, contractual gaps may leave gains from trade unrealized; they may create...

This paper constitutes an attempt to reframe and eventually deflate the ongoing “compliance-vs.-rebalancing” debate which has permeated WTO scholarship for the last 10 years. Our main criticism concerns the substance of the entire debate. We find that scholars on both sides of the...

Recent years have witnessed an ever-increasing resort to export restrictions in the markets for raw materials, causing heightened uncertainty about supply availability together with friction among trading partners. Poor transparency can amplify and compound the effects of restrictive trade...

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...

The incidence of export taxes, prohibitions and other measures that raise export prices, limit export quantities or place conditions on exporting is on the rise. Transparency can help mitigate the negative effects of export restrictions by enabling affected stakeholders to better understand and...

Duplication, delays or discrimination in CAPs can significantly increase trade costs, and this risk is reflected in the growing importance of CAPs in WTO discussions and bilateral and regional free trade agreements. This paper conducts an empirical study of the trade issues that WTO Members...

WTO rules for safeguards have helped individual WTO Members to discipline domestic protectionist interests and to advance a generally liberal trade policy stance. This constructive use of safeguards and other trade remedies has been more effectively supported by the parts of the rules that deal...