Multilateralising Regionalism: Disciplines on Export Restrictions in Regional Trade Agreements

Jane Korinek () and Jessica Bartos

No 139, OECD Trade Policy Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: The proliferation of preferential trade agreements has posed challenges for the multilateral trading system. But regional trade agreements (RTAs) also allow countries to develop and strengthen trade disciplines beyond what is possible at the multilateral level. In some instances, RTAs explore policy areas that are the subject of few disciplines at the multilateral level. They may provide lessons and suggest good practices that could be used to inform discussions in a wider setting. One such policy area is export restrictions and taxes. Export restrictions and duties have not been given the same degree of attention in multilateral trade agreements and negotiations as the elimination of import tariffs and quantitative restrictions. The WTO provides a general prohibition on quantitative export restrictions but the broad and, at times, ambiguous exceptions somewhat vitiate the ban. Moreover, export taxes are not explicitly forbidden in the WTO. This study suggests that there are a number of ways by which WTO disciplines could benefit from the approaches found in some RTAs in the area of export restrictions.

Keywords: dispute settlement; export charges; export duties; export fees; export levies; export licensing; export restraints; export restrictions; export tariffs; export taxes; GATT; GATT Article XI; GATT Article XX; minimum export prices; multilateral trading system; preferential trade agreements; PTA; quantitative export restrictions; regional trade agreements; RTA; trade creation; trade disciplines; trade diverting; trade instruments; WTO; WTO provisions; WTO-plus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 F10 F13 F15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-06-29
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/5k962hf7hfnr-en (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:traaab:139-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Trade Policy Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().