Kent Jones

The political economy of WTO accession: the unfinished business of universal membership

While the WTO now represents most of the worlds population, GDP, and trade, the accession process since its founding has been lengthy, and it is getting longer. Compared to its predecessor, the GATT, the WTO applies a much more detailed and legalistic approach to accession, due to its broader scope of policy coverage and the enforcement powers of the Dispute Settlement Understanding. In WTO accession cases, WTO incumbent members have a superior bargaining position. The present study provides evidence that the elapsed time from WTO application to accession has increased with the number of completed accessions, suggesting a process of learning by WTO members to bargain for more demanding concessions from applicants. Regarding the terms of accession, the number of rules commitments has increased, and the level of bound tariffs has fallen, as the number of completed accessions has increased. In view of the difficult cases remaining in order to complete universal WTO membership, the author proposes more flexibility in accession requirements, along the lines of the GATT tradition.

Green room politics and the WTO's crisis of representation

World Trade Organization (WTO) Green Room meetings are small gatherings of representatives from up to 30 member countries, invited by the Director-General. They are designed to provide the basis for a consensus on critical negotiating issues that can be brought to the WTO membership as a whole. Green rooms appear to be a necessary feature of consensus building in such a large organization, but they have been criticized because they tend to favor representation from large and high-income member countries. This paper discusses the impact of the green room on the WTO decision-making process and the possibilities of reform.

The WTO core agreement, non-trade issues and institutional integrity

WTO member countries understand the core agreement of the organization to consist of binding reciprocal market access achieved through multilateral negotiation, and supported by a system of trade policy rules and dispute settlement. Attempts to introduce social chapters into the WTO would compromise the core agreement. Specifically, authorizing the use of trade sanctions to pursue non-trade goals would diminish the value of the WTO to its members, and undermine the global trading system. WTO agreements and rules can be reconciled with environmental goals, the improvement of labor standards and the promotion of human rights through the development and strengthening of international institutions dedicated to these issues. Efforts by governments to promote new global institutions and international agreements would thereby remove political barriers to trade liberalization.

Patterns of Representation in WTO Committee Chairs, 1995–2012

This paper sets out to examine the pattern of WTO committee chair appointments by nationality since the WTOs founding in 1995. Chairs of the General Council (GC), subsidiary and negotiating committees play important roles in the outcome of trade negotiations and in administrative and implementation issues in Geneva. The GC selects most committee chairs, and must consider the balance of member representation and the quality of the candidates in its choices. Regression results indicate that the selection of a chair by nationality generally reflects the countrys mission size in Geneva, the countrys years of experience as a WTO member, and its economic interests in trade. The experience of individuals and continuity in committee leadership also appear to play important roles. Among developing countries, emerging markets (EMs) tend to have the largest proportional representation. The GC thus appears to follow a human capital model of chair selection, geographical constraints and especially development status balance considerations. Continued investments among all WTO members, but especially EM and other developing countries, in WTO representation and leadership capacity will be required in order to promote multilateral trade liberalization in the future.

Trade Policy and the Environment

Over the past two decades, there has been considerable debate about the connection between trade and environmental policy. A specific concern of the environmental lobby has been that with increased trade liberalization, governments will not be able to set appropriate environmental policies, due to the fact that they may be constrained in their use of complementary trade policies by WTO/GATT rules. A key implication drawn from this is that, without the ability to apply border measures such as tariffs, industries in countries that apply tough environmental standards will be hurt either through loss of market share or their total displacement to countries with weaker environmental standards, thereby creating pollution havens. The ongoing policy discussion on how to address climate change is clearly characterized by this same set of concerns. Developed countries, including the United States and the EU, are pursuing national efforts to reduce carbon emissions. In doing so, the expectation is that their energy-intensive industries will face increased costs of production. As a consequence, much of the proposed climate legislation also includes some type of border measure targeted at energy-intensive imports, popularly referred to as carbon tariffs. The argument for such border measures is twofold: first, there will be carbon leakage, i.e., production by domestic energy-intensive industries such as steel will simply be replaced by production in countries with less restrictive climate policies; second, there will be a reduction in competitiveness of firms in those industries most affected by domestic climate policies. The inclusion of border adjustments in proposed climate legislation can be rationalized as follows: by utilizing import tariffs (export subsidies) on all energy-intensive traded goods, carbon leakage is reduced (competitiveness restored) by worsening the terms of trade for