General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade: a treaty signed in Geneva in 1947 that aimed to foster multilateral trade and settle trading disputes between adherent...
A specific tariff determines the tariff at the border by placing the amount in relation to the quantity of the good imported; perhaps the tariff might be a certain amount of dollars per bottle of wine or a certain amount of Euro per ton of steel. These types of tariffs...
In this paper, the authors examine the nature of the exception for Regional Trade Agreements RTAs under Article XXIV:5 of GATT 1994. This exception, which aims to maximise the internal trade-liberalising effects of an RTA while minimising its external trade-restricting effects, applies specifically to measures adopted upon the formation of...
The GATT treaty's loophole for free trade areas in Article XXIV has puzzled and deceived prominent scholars, who trace its postwar origins to US aspirations to promote European integration and efforts to persuade developing countries to endorse the Havana Charter. Drawing from archival records, this article shows that in fact...
The title of this paper is more ambitious than what its contents justify. The agreement signed in Marrakesh in April 1994 consists of twenty thousand pages that, at a rate of twenty pages per night, could make interesting bed time reading for many of them, for 1001 Arabian nights. Although...
The report considers the design and implementation of international trade agreements when: negotiations are undertaken and commitments made in the presence of uncertainty about future political pressures; governments possess private information about political pressures at the time that the agreement is actually implemented; and negotiated commitments can be implemented only...
The successful completion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT has generated much optimism about the future of world trade, and with good reason. If ratified, the accord will not only eliminate tariffs on many goods, but will be the first GATT round accord...
A major constraint impeding progress in the Doha round is how to deal with demands by many developing country WTO members for strengthened and more effective "Special and differential treatment" SDT. Traditionally, developing countries have sought 'differential and more favorable treatment' in the GATT/WTO with a view to increasing the...
This paper reviews this concept in the context of the history of the GATT/WTO and of different views as to its underlying rationale. It also takes a preliminary look at what a framework of variable geometry might involve and considers some of the benefits and problems likely to be associated...
Korea's economic development saga that amazed economists and policy makers has been filled with numerous trade disputes with its major trading partners. Despite the prevalence of such bilateral trade disputes, Korea had shown unequivocal resistance to resort to the multilateral dispute settlement forum under the GATT system. Since the inception...
This paper consists of six sections. The second Section briefly reviews Japan's experience with the GATT/WTO dispute settlement mechanism. The third analyzes Japan's offensive use of the mechanism ("Sword" aspects), taking Parts and Components case and Section 301 Automobiles case as examples. The fourth Section analyzes Japan's defensive use of...
This paper shows how the institutional rules imposed on its signatories by the GATT created a strategic incentive for countries to liberalize gradually. Free trade can never be achieved if punishment for deviation from a trade agreement is limited to a 'withdrawal of equivalent concessions.' Trade liberalization must be gradual...
This paper examines the hypothesis that membership in the World Trade Organization WTO and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT has increased the stability and predictability of trade flows. It uses a large data set covering annual bilateral trade flows between over 175 countries between 1950...
It has long been observed that developing countries made scant use of dispute settlement under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT. The underlying presumption, of course, is that developing countries were especially ill-served by GATT's diplomacy, and are better poised to benefit from the WTO's more legalistic architecture....
Preferential trading arrangements PTAs! Have spread widely over the past fifty years during the same era, multilateral openness has grown to unprecedented heights, spurred by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT! And its successor, the World Trade Organization WTO! If the cornerstone of the manifestly successful multilateral regime...
The Uruguay Round Agreement on Safeguards represents an effort to improve the GATT safeguards SG process and thereby encourage countries to choose this option over antidumping and "Gray-area" measures such as bilaterally negotiated export restraints. This paper offers a first detailed analysis of the way safeguards initiated under the agreement...
This paper evaluates the cost associated with rent-seeking. As opposed to what might be hypothesized under the full or partial rent-seeking hypothesis, expenditures on lobbying do not vary with the rent brought about by the regulation. However, rent-seeking expenditures do vary with the amount of influence producers have with the...
This paper furnishes robust evidence that the GATT/WTO has had a powerful and positive impact on trade. The impact has, however, been uneven. GATT/WTO membership for industrial countries has been associated with a large increase in imports estimated at about 40 percent of world trade. The same has not been...
As one of the most potent sources of US leverage in international bargaining is control over access to US markets, a necessary preface to the following discussion is a brief review of GATT/WTO principles. Among the other "Pillars" of GATT are a general prohibition of resort to quantitative restrictions, including...
The single clearest most direct result of economic globalization to date is a massive global transfer of economic and political power away from national governments and into the hands of global corporations and the trade bureaucracies they helped create. This transfer of power is producing dire consequences for the environment...
Over the past 50 years, a remarkable degree of trade liberalization has been achieved through GATT/WTO negotiations. This paper describes work that provides a theoretical interpretation of this institution. The paper emphasizes two key features of GATT/WTO: reciprocity and enforcement. The paper also identifies important areas for future research. The...
