Beyond the WTO? An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements

Abstract

It is often alleged that PTAs involving the EC and the US include a significant number of obligations in areas not currently covered by the WTO Agreement, such as investment protection, competition policy, labour standards and environmental protection. The primary purpose of this study is to highlight the extent to which these claims are true. The study divides the contents of all PTAs involving the EC and the US currently notified to the WTO, into 14 ‘WTO+’ and 38 ‘WTO-X’ areas, where WTO+ provisions come under the current mandate of the WTO, and WTO‐X provisions deal with issues lying outside the current WTO mandate. As a second step, the legal enforceability of each obligation is evaluated, and judged on the extent to which the text specifies clear obligations. Among the findings are: (i) EC agreements contain almost four times as many instances of WTO‐X provisions as do US agreements; (ii) but EC agreements evidence a very significant amount of ‘legal inflation’ (i.e. non‐legally enforceable provisions) in the WTO‐X category, and US agreements actually contain more enforceable WTO‐X provisions than do the EC agreements; (iii) US agreements tend to emphasise regulatory areas more compared to EC agreements.

Kick‐starting diffusion: Explaining the varying frequency of preferential trade agreements’ environmental provisions by their initial conditions

“…First, it contributes to the literature on the design of PTAs (e.g., Baccini, Dür, & Elsig, 2015;Bearce, Eldredge, & Jolliff, 2016;Büthe & Milner, 2014;Hafner-Burton, 2009). In earlier studies, PTAs were grouped by whether they favour deep or shallow commitments (Dür, Baccini, & Elsig, 2014), positive or negative integration (Kim & Manger, 2016) and WTO-plus or WTO-extra obligations (Horn, Mavroidis, & Sapir, 2010;Kohl, Brakman, & Garretsen, 2016). This paper looks more specifically at environmental provisions as an increasingly important subset of PTA design features.…”

Asian Economic Integration in an Era of Global Uncertainty

“…Traditional chapters regarding trade in goods only accounted for a small part of the TPP. Most of the chapters addressed behind-the-border issues or WTO-X policy areas, which included investment, cross-border trade in services, financial services, temporary entry for business persons, telecommunications, ecommerce, government procurement, competition policy, SOEs and designated monopolies, intellectual property, labour, environment, regulatory coherence, transparency and anti-corruption (Horn, Mavroidis & Sapir, 2010). Prior to the TPP, these WTO-X chapters had seldom been incorporated in existing FTAs in the region.…”

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“…11. On WTO databases, see WTO (2015a,b); on the annual flagship, see WTO (2011); and on the characterization of RTA provisions across agreements, see Chase et al (2013) and Horn et al (2010). 12.…”