Beyond the WTO ?An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements

Andre Sapir, Henrik Horn and Petros Mavroidis

ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: It is often alleged that PTAs involving the EC and the US include a significant number of obligations in areas not currently covered by the WTO Agreement, such as investment protection, competition policy, labour standards and environmental protection. The primary purpose of this study is to highlight the extent to which these claims are true. The study divides the contents of all PTAs involving the EC and the US currently notified to the WTO, into 14 'WTO+' and 38 'WTO-X' areas, where WTO+ provisions come under the current mandate of the WTO, and WTO-X provisions deal with issues lying outside the current WTO mandate. As a second step, the legal enforceability of each obligation is evaluated, and judged on the extent to which the text specifies clear obligations. Among the findings are: (i) EC agreements contain almost four times as many instances of WTO-X provisions as do US agreements; (ii) but EC agreements evidence a very significant amount of 'legal inflation' (i.e. non-legally enforceable provisions) in the WTO-X category, and US agreements actually contain more enforceable WTO-X provisions than do the EC agreements; (iii) US agreements tend to emphasise regulatory areas more compared to EC agreements. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Date: 2010
Note: SCOPUS: re.j
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (154)

Published in: World economy (2010) v.33 n° 11,p.1565-1588

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Beyond the WTO ?An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements (2011)
Journal Article: Beyond the WTO? An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements (2010)
Book: Beyond the WTO? An anatomy of EU and US preferential trade agreements (2009)
Working Paper: Beyond the WTO? An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements (2009)
Working Paper: Beyond the WTO ?An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements (2009)
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:ulb:ulbeco:2013/174319

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/174319

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels (bpauwels@ulb.ac.be).