Leverage in trade agreements and linkages - challenges to the trade and rights linkages

Maria Garcia

Chapter 2 in Understanding the EU as a Good Global Actor, 2022, pp 37-52 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Drawing on international relations' understandings of power and leverage in negotiations, this chapter highlights the limitations on the EU's ability to leverage its market power in trade negotiations to extract human right and social clauses, even with structurally weaker actors. A comparison of recent EU trade agreements reveals subtle differences in how the essential human rights clause has been incorporated into agreements. This enables an exploration of how the characteristics of the subjects of EU leverage (relative economic significance to the EU, competitiveness, and geoeconomic positioning) affect EU leverage in negotiations. This chapter posits that the relative erosion of EU market power (accelerated by Brexit), the approach of other powers, and the time-pressures have pushed the EU into a position of accepting some dilution of its preferred values to sign timely agreements that overall support its commitment to liberal rules-based trading.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Environment; Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy Sustainable Development Goals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781802202984/9781802202984.00009.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:elg:eechap:21029_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().