India and the Mega-Regional Trade Deals

Is the WTO over? Mega-regional/plurilateral free trade negotiations: perspectives of multilateralism in trade

“…18 The EU's goals concerning trade in goods and customs duties (tariffs as it's best known) is very simple: although industrial tariffs are generally fairly low (less than 2 percent in average in the EU-US trade) and over half of the transatlantic trade is not subject of duties/tariffs, but the rest faces extremely different duties/tariffs, some other duties/tariffs are even prohibitive. 19 In some cases, EU and US duties/tariffs are largely different even on the same products/group of 16 The three main chapters consist of 24 trade and investment issues. The European Commission "as part of its latest transparency initiative" has already published 27 fact sheets (2 page long each), 15 EU position papers ("these set out how we'd want a final deal to read, line by line") as well as 12 EU textual proposal ("what we want to achieve in a chapter".…”

“…The EU's position in this field is "to set out a jointly agreed interpretation, implementation and/or practice in relation to certain IP 10.18531/Studia.Mundi.2015.02.02. [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] issues debated in the international framework. The goal is to find a common denominator between EU and US rules, without modifying them, in jointly identified areas, thus increasing legal clarity and certainty for transatlantic trade.…”

“…Some researchers have proposed that a conditional offer of reduction in tariffs be made in return for 10.18531/Studia.Mundi.2015.02.02. [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] opening negotiations in other areas, to be otherwise revoked by the countries concerned if sufficient progress is not seen. However drawbacks remain from the same unresolved special and differential reciprocity problem which has dogged the Doha Round negotiations.…”

“…10.18531/Studia.Mundi.2015.02.02. [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] It seems obvious that the proliferation of mega-regional approaches are the reaction to a twodecade series of failures of WTO to reach an accord on certain issues: plurilateral negotiations are issue-based (Nakatomi, 2014), and these issues are identical to the ones that remained unsolved by WTO, such as non-tariff barriers; agreements on trade in services; on global nondiscrimination; on the alignment of investment promotion and trade policy instruments; on intellectual property related commercial issues; on the intertwining of trade and sustainability; on access to peers' public procurement markets, etc.…”

“…First, the 10.18531/Studia.Mundi.2015.02.02. [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] dynamic expansion of international trade 1 (figures 1, 2), second, the increasing share of developing and emerging economies within total world trade. The main explanatory factor of the above developments is the ongoing trade liberalization that has facilitated the expansion of developing countries' export.…”