The result of all this: a substantially higher degree of market security for traders and investors. The system tries to improve predictability and stability in other ways as well. Many WTO agreements require governments to disclose their policies and practices publicly within the country or by notifying the WTO. The regular surveillance of national trade policies through the Trade Policy Review Mechanism provides a further means of encouraging transparency both domestically and at the multilateral level.
The system does allow tariffs and, in limited circumstances, other forms of protection. More accurately, it is a system of rules dedicated to open, fair and undistorted competition. So too are those on dumping exporting at below cost to gain market share and subsidies. The issues are complex, and the rules try to establish what is fair or unfair, and how governments can respond, in particular by charging additional import duties calculated to compensate for damage caused by unfair trade.
Many of the other WTO agreements aim to support fair competition: in agriculture, intellectual property, services, for example. And so on. The WTO system contributes to development. And the agreements themselves inherit the earlier provisions of GATT that allow for special assistance and trade concessions for developing countries. Over three quarters of WTO members are developing countries and countries in transition to market economies. During the seven and a half years of the Uruguay Round, over 60 of these countries implemented trade liberalization programmes autonomously.
At the same time, developing countries and transition economies were much more active and influential in the Uruguay Round negotiations than in any previous round, and they are even more so in the current Doha Development Agenda.
At the end of the Uruguay Round, developing countries were prepared to take on most of the obligations that are required of developed countries. A ministerial decision adopted at the end of the round says better-off countries should accelerate implementing market access commitments on goods exported by the least-developed countries, and it seeks increased technical assistance for them.
More recently, developed countries have started to allow duty-free and quota-free imports for almost all products from least-developed countries. On all of this, the WTO and its members are still going through a learning process. This sounds like a contradiction. FTAs, however, have generally been viewed as vehicles of trade liberalization; therefore, the GATT contains an exception for such agreements. The exception applies both to completed FTAs as well as to the interim agreements leading to their formation.
The increasing number of regional agreements and the substantial amount of trade covered by them led GATT parties to try to strengthen the existing multilateral discipline during the GATT Uruguay Round. To comply with Article XXIV, FTAs must meet four fundamental requirements: 1 duties and other restrictive commercial regulations must be eliminated; 2 substantially all trade must be covered; 3 external tariffs and commercial regulations—that is, measures applicable to nonparties—may not be higher or more restrictive than those in effect before the FTA or interim agreement was formed; and 4 interim agreements must contain a plan and schedule to achieve these goals within a reasonable period of time.
The General Agreement on Trade in Services GATS , which also contains a general MFN obligation, provides an exception for trade liberalizing regional service agreements, so long as barriers and other restrictions on trade in services be eliminated immediately or within a reasonable time frame and, the agreement provides substantial sectoral coverage.
Finally, parties to the agreement must notify the Council for Trade in Services of the existence of such an agreement and, if implementing on a time frame, report periodically to the Council. One of the most problematic aspects of Article XXIV, particularly as it applies to the exclusion of economic sectors from FTAs, is the meaning of the term "substantially all trade. Article 2. While not ruling on the relationship of Article XXIV to the imposition of safeguards, WTO panels and the Appellate Body have identified a requirement of "parallelism" in the Safeguards Agreement dictating that if serious injury were to be based on all imports, including those from the FTA, the safeguards should apply to the same imports.
For example, in the WTO challenge to the now-removed safeguard on steel imports imposed by the United States in March , the panel, as upheld by the Appellate Body, faulted the United States for including the imports of affected products from U. FTA partners in its investigation of whether increased imports were the cause of serious injury, while excluding these countries' imports from the remedial safeguard without providing a "reasoned and adequate" explanation for why the imports covered by the safeguard alone satisfied the requirements for imposing the measure.
Safeguards provisions are also included in recently signed FTAs with Colombia, Panama and the Republic of Korea, all of which are awaiting approval by Congress. Both the U. Suspension Agreements. Suspension agreements require ongoing monitoring by Commerce to ensure compliance and effectiveness. Bilateral Investment Treaties. A Bilateral Investment Treaty is designed to ensure that U.
It protects U. Intellectual Property Rights Agreements. Receive information and assistance regarding intellectual property rights such as guides, contact information, STOPfakes Roadshows, and toolkits. IP Rights Agreements.
Trade Agreement Guides.
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