Reassessing the Safeguards Mess

Bernard Hoekman and Petros Mavroidis

No 2023/14, RSCAS Working Papers from European University Institute

Abstract: The WTO Agreement on Safeguards was hailed as an important achievement of the Uruguay round,rightly so, given that it managed to outlaw the use of voluntary export restraints. Intended to facilitatethe use of transparent, temporary, and non-discriminatory instruments to assist domestic industriesinjured by import competition, World Trade Organization (WTO) jurisprudence undermined therealization of this objective. Worse, erratic case law created negative externalities, ranging fromgreater recourse to more discriminatory trade practices and use by the United States (US) of thetypes of managed trade that the Agreement of Safeguards was meant to abolish. As in the classicbootlegger-Baptist metaphor in the literature on regulation, the unintended consequence of WTOjurisprudence on safeguards has been more rather than less selective protection (discriminatorytrade policies). As, if not more important, it made it more difficult for WTO members to use aninstrument intended to assist governments in sustaining political support for an open trade regime.In this paper, we describe the source of discomfort and suggest ways to address it in a meaningfulmanner.

Keywords: Emergency protection; safeguards; trade agreements; WTO; Appellate Body (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/75374/ ... quence=1&isAllowed=y (application/pdf)
https://hdl.handle.net/1814/75374 (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:rsc:rsceui:2023/14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RSCAS Working Papers from European University Institute Convento, Via delle Fontanelle, 19, 50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI) Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RSCAS web unit ().