Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have become an indelible feature of the international trading landscape. Most, if not all, RTAs contain provisions that establish procedures for resolving disputes among their signatory members. Yet, the design and functioning of these dispute settlement...

At first glance, this paper deals with a simple classification issue only: the coverage and treatment of certain manufacturing operations and the resulting products under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) rather than under its long-standing counterpart in merchandise trade, the...

Are market access commitments on services in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) reciprocal or simply unilateral? If reciprocal, do concessions granted in services depend on concessions received from the trading partner in other services or in non-services areas as well? In this paper we...

This paper deals with claims, recently raised in various circles, that structural faults in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) have prevented WTO Members from advancing services liberalization under the Agreement. The GATS is generally associated in this context with a bottom-up...

This paper assembles detailed information about the intellectual property (IP) provisions contained in 194 active regional trade agreements (RTAs) that had been notified to the WTO by November 2010. IP provisions in RTAs have been the subject of much study and commentary. However, much of this...

As of November 2010, more than 300 regional trade agreements (RTAs) were in force. Approximately two-thirds of them had been notified to the WTO. Each of these RTAs had, implicitly or explicitly, established a regional legal framework for the application of intra-regional, and sometimes...

Issues related to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) supplying services have been raised at earlier stages of the Doha Round in various negotiating contexts and, more recently, at meetings of the Council for Trade in Services. It is difficult, however, to find a common denominator as to...

The study tries first to assess the extent of similarities and divergences among services rules in regional trade agreements as compared to the GATS. To do so, it uses a typology identifying variations in 48 key provisions structured under seven themes commonly found in RTAs and using the GATS...

The WTO TBT Agreement obliges governments to use international standards as a basis for regulation, yet leaves a degree of flexibility with respect to the choice of standard, and the manner of its use. This interplay between obligation and flexibility has given rise to tension in various fora of...

The paper first surveys the Trade Facilitation landscape at the regional level and analyses the main forces shaping it. It identifies key factors driving regional Facilitation approaches, examining their priorities, features and underlying philosophies. The study also highlights significant...