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"AGREEMENT ON TRADE"
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Africa's silk road : China and India's new economic frontier
New horizons are opening for Africa, with a growing number of Chinese andIndian businesses fostering its integration into advanced markets. However,significant imbalances will have to be addressed on both sides of the equation to support long-term growth.
eBook
The Implementation Game
In the 1990s, the fight between North and South over intellectual property (IP) reached new heights. The result was the World Trade Organization's (WTO's) deeply contested agreement on Trade‐Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Widely resented by developing countries, TRIPS nonetheless permits them some hard‐won flexibility. Puzzling, however, is why some developing countries have used that flexibility and others have not. Even more curious is that despite securing some extra concessions, many of the poorest countries have made least use of them. For scholars of international political economy and law, this book is the first detailed exploration of the links between global IP politics and the implementation of IP reforms. It exposes how power politics occur not just within global trade talks but afterwards when countries implement agreements. For developing countries, TRIPS did not end the IP offensive. At the urging of lobbyists from large multinational companies, powerful countries backtracked on the flexibilities in TRIPS and pursued even stronger global IP rules. To prevent precedents for weaker IP standards in poorer countries, they issued threats to market access, aid, investment, and political alliances. Further, they used new trade deals and, more subtly, ‘capacity‐building’ (assisted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, among others) to leverage faster compliance and higher standards than TRIPS requires. Meanwhile, ‘pro‐development’ advocates from civil society, other UN agencies, and developing countries worked to counter ‘compliance‐plus’ pressures and defend the use of TRIPS flexibilities, sometimes with success. Within developing countries, most governments had little experience of IP law. They often deferred TRIPS implementation to IP offices cut‐off from trade politics and national policymaking, making them more vulnerable to the TRIPS‐plus agenda. In francophone Africa, regional IP arrangements magnified this effect.
eBook
The Evolution of the Trade Regime
The Evolution of the Trade Regime offers a comprehensive political-economic history of the development of the world's multilateral trade institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). While other books confine themselves to describing contemporary GATT/WTO legal rules or analyzing their economic logic, this is the first to explain the logic and development behind these rules.
The book begins by examining the institutions' rules, principles, practices, and norms from their genesis in the early postwar period to the present. It evaluates the extent to which changes in these institutional attributes have helped maintain or rebuild domestic constituencies for open markets.
The book considers these questions by looking at the political, legal, and economic foundations of the trade regime from many angles. The authors conclude that throughout most of GATT/WTO history, power politics fundamentally shaped the creation and evolution of the GATT/WTO system. Yet in recent years, many aspects of the trade regime have failed to keep pace with shifts in underlying material interests and ideas, and the challenges presented by expanding membership and preferential trade agreements.
eBook
Commentaries on world trade law
\"With the conclusion of the Uruguay Round, the World Trade Organization was established as a fully-fledged international organization including a comprehensive dispute settlement system which has, however, recently been challenged. This commentary on the Agreement Establishing the WTO, the Dispute Settlement Understanding and the Trade Review Policy Mechanism offers a comprehensive overview of the legislative history, interpretation, practical application and challenges to the institutional system of the WTO. This volume brings together contributions by distinguished scholars and practitioners and aims at giving guidance to all interested in the WTO institutional arrangements and dispute settlement system\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Applying WTO and FTA disciplines to data localization measures
The last decade has seen a proliferation of measures requiring data to be stored within national borders. Such restrictions, known as 'data localization measures', disrupt digital trade and run counter to the borderless reality of the internet. But the effectiveness of existing WTO rules to adequately discipline data localization measures remains inconclusive. In the absence of meaningful progress at the multilateral level, FTA negotiations are developing new models to address such barriers. This article compares how data localization measures would be disciplined under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) framework. It argues that the CPTPP represents a significant advance on the GATS and strikes an appropriate balance between facilitating businesses' growing need to transfer and store data across national borders while preserving governments' right to regulate in the public interest.
Journal Article
International trade agreements: a threat to tobacco control policy
International covenants establish a role for governments in ensuring the conditions for human health and wellbeing, which has been recognised as a central human right. International trade agreements, conversely, prioritise the rights of corporations over health and human rights. International trade agreements are threatening existing tobacco control policies and restrict the possibility of implementing new controls. This situation is unrecognised by many tobacco control advocates in signatory nations, especially those in developing countries. Recent agreements on eliminating various trade restrictions, including those on tobacco, have expanded far beyond simply international movement of goods to include internal tobacco distribution regulations and intellectual property rules regulating advertising and labelling. Our analysis shows that to the extent trade agreements protect the tobacco industry, in itself a deadly enterprise, they erode human rights principles and contribute to ill health. The tobacco industry has used trade policy to undermine effective barriers to tobacco importation. Trade negotiations provide an unwarranted opportunity for the tobacco industry to assert its interests without public scrutiny. Trade agreements provide the industry with additional tools to obstruct control policies in both developed and developing countries and at every level. The health community should become involved in reversing these trends, and help promote additional measures to protect public health.
Journal Article