The Internationalization of Regulation: Implications for Developing Countries

Abstract

The profound changes of the world trading system since the 1980s are reflected in the transition from "shallow" to "deeper" integration. Shallow integration is economic integration based on the removal of barriers to exchange at the border, and limited coordination of national policies. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the International Monetary Fund were the core global institutions in the management of shallow integration. The remarkable success achieved in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s in removing tariffs and quantitative restrictions served to underscore the significance of non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to international trade. Economists had been aware for a long time of a "principle of equivalence", according to which any trade concessions can be nullified by imposing an offsetting set of domestic policies. However, the practical significance of this principle was generally appreciated only in the late 1970s, when national governments reacted to the double threat of economic stagnation and inflation by increasing the level of protection of domestic industry by massive recourse to NTBs, in particular technical and health standards. These developments could be observed not only in the world economy at large, but even in the European Community/European Union (EC/EU), where the abolition of internal tariffs, already achieved in the 1960s, was seriously impaired by the proliferation of national regulations and standards. It thus became clear that no institutional arrangement that oversees trade liberalization can afford to confine its rules and attention to "border" measures. Hence the emergence of issues of deeper integration on the international agenda. These issues concern "behind-the-border" policies that had previously not been subject to international scrutiny or negotiation. Instead of the older agenda of removing barriers that block exchange at the national borders, the new agenda items include conflicts over domestic regulatory regimes and perceived policy "externalities" (Kahler, 1995, p.2). In the EC/EU the turn to deeper integration was signified by the internal market program, which was supposed to achieve a fully integrated European market by 1992. In the international trading system, concerns about the impact of domestic regulations on free trade led to the Tokyo and Uruguay Rounds Agreements on technical barriers to trade; to the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, (SPS agreement), also reached in the Uruguay Round; to extending the scope and competence of the international trading rules by the inclusion of new subjects such as agriculture and intellectual property rights; finally, to the transformation, in 1995, of the GATT into the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Agri‐Food Governance and Expertise: The Production of International Food Standards

“…The case of the Nutrition Committee suggests that it is the authority of claims made by groups of scientists, not their scientific expertise, which is open to challenge. International standard setting invariably brings together diverse regulatory systems and such encounters can lead to competition (Geradin and McCahery 2004;Majone 2004). In this context it becomes difficult for networks of professionals to articulate authoritative knowledge claims.…”