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AbstractThe Law and Development literature still debates on the role of international institutions in promoting legal reforms as a means of inducing economic growth. This article takes one step further by arguing that incremental circumstances compelled such institutions to change from bilaterally-binding pressures to soft-based multilateral strategies, by analyzing the gradual rise of the World Bank's "Doing Business" initiative.
The international trade system has been facing a relative decrease in the relevance of tariffs in favour of non-tariff, regulatory requirements (technical, sanitary and phytosanitary standards). The proliferation of these measures, which essentially consist of rules on product labelling and on production processes and methods, may be explained by the growing influence of private agents, such as corporations and business associations. Although these players are willing to develop and enforce a competing regulatory framework such as this on a broader range of topics, this may also generate more fragmented trade rules at both geographic and substantive levels, thus leading to a significant resistance among governments to integrate private standards into the multilateral trade system. Therefore, a mounting debate emerges on the ways in which private standards have been stonewalled in the current negotiation processes of the World Trade Organization (WTO). By relying on Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), we address this question with a particular focus on the current efforts and struggles within the WTO to incorporate private regulations into the international trade agenda.
This article investigates the circumstances under which the agenda of intellectual property rights (IPRs) influences the decision of states to pursue preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Governments are often prone to negotiate PTAs due to distinctive pressures from IPR-intensive industries to disseminate TRIPS-Plus standards, which are particularly willing to capitalize on the advantages of preferential arrangements. To illustrate this argument, we examine the processes around the expansion of IPR provisions in the PTAs signed by the United States with Latin American countries, as enabled by the Trade Promotion Authority Act of 2002. We find that, while broad variations of TRIPS-Plus standards emerged across these PTAs, both governments and private sector tend to perceive gains from this setup, since PTAs are unlikely to undermine the IPR standards achieved by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (hereinafter ‘TRIPS Agreement’), but still provide opportunity for the promotion of higher IPR standards in each individual market.
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