The paper reviews the disciplines for tackling regulatory divergence in services included in 23 PTAs entered into by China, the EU, Japan, and the USA. It identifies a remarkable expansion in the number and extent of disciplines on regulatory transparency, regulatory coherence, and regulatory cooperation compared with GATS, which, subject to adequate implementation, will allow these agreements to deliver a degree of market integration well beyond what could be achieved simply by removing market access restrictions and discriminatory measures from the rule book. However, the paper calls for some restraint when estimating the potential impact of these disciplines, mainly because of the soft language used for phrasing some of them and the anticipated high implementation costs, particularly for countries with unsophisticated domestic legal systems.

This text presents the first systematic quantitative descriptive and explanatory account of World Trade Organization (WTO) member states’ compliance with their one-time and regular notification obligations. The system of around 170 notifications, through which states are obliged to provide to the WTO relevant information on their policies, constitutes a key mechanism of transparency in the global trade regime. Based on data for the one-time and regular obligations from the years 1995–2014, we seek to map and explain the variation in the degree to which states comply with these obligations. Descriptively, we identify enormous differences in the compliance values of states, ranging from compliance well above 80% to below 20%. To explain those differences, we test five theoretical explanations that concentrate on the trade policy preferences of states and on their institutional characteristics. The empirical findings support four of the tested explanations. In particular, they highlight the relevance of states’ administrative capacities and membership in international organizations (IOs). In addition, the empirical analysis shows that compliance levels are strongly positively connected with the economic size of the members.

This paper analyzes the impact of the presence of foreign missions on trade using Turkey's unique expansion in its foreign embassy network (39 new embassies in 8 years) as the source of variation in a panel data setting. A majority of the existing empirical studies use cross-sectional bilateral trade data due to lack of variation over time (Rose, 2007; Moons and Bergeijk, 2013). Employing a panel data analysis, this paper is able to address the endogeneity issues that are associated with a standard cross-sectional analysis. The dependent variable in the paper is the trade between Turkey and 190 countries for 2006 to 2016. The results indicate that presence of an embassy increases export value by 30% and this increase comes mainly from the volume effect. Categorizing goods by the Rauch (1999) classification shows that the increase in differentiated goods exports is the main driver of the export surge. The number of exporting firms increases by about 8%. There is no statistically significant impact on the exports of homogeneous goods. Replication of the analysis for imports suggests no impact on imports.

The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of trade barriers and cultural distance on the domestic market share in the film industry. We analyze panel data with both two-stage least squares and instrumental-variable methods. These methods can separate the effects of time-invariant measures of trade barriers and cultural difference from country-specific effects. This improvement in the estimation method and the use of a more appropriate measure of trade barriers in the film industry enable us to produce empirical results that are consistent with theoretical arguments. Based on the panel data collected from 30 countries for the period 2001–2013, the empirical results herein indicate that the cultural distance, as well as market size, is an important factor for the domestic market share. Trade barriers are also shown to be a significant factor, but the magnitude of their impact on the domestic market share is much smaller than that of the market size.

We use a political economy perspective to provide the first empirical analysis of the main political and economic determinants of asynchronous approval (AA) for a variety of countries over the period 2000–2015. The key results that emerge from our paper are the prominent role of regulatory quality and the number of internet users in a particular country in influencing AA across countries. We found that the higher the share of internet users in a country, the lower the AA. Consumer access to the internet makes them less exposed to negative news about genetically modified (GM) products, as they are less influenced by the negative bias of traditional mass media toward biotechnology. Additionally, the better the regulation quality (the more efficiently a government formulates and implements regulation), the shorter the time necessary to approve new GM events, and the lower the AA. Furthermore, our findings confirm that determinants such as corruption, trade relations with stringent markets, and the size of the rural population are also important in explaining AA of GM events.

The case law on non-precluded measures clauses, when they are successful, and the customary rule of necessity, when it fails, transfers significant risks to foreign investors and host States, respectively, during severe economic crises. Some risk-sharing mechanisms should be explored to achieve a more balanced result. This article presents the policy reasons in support of this approach and its normative basis: the principle of acceptable compensation, and illustrates that one way to introduce such mechanisms is through the determination by investor/State tribunals of the length of the breakdown, which is marked by the dates for its beginning and end. The article discusses economic research on when crises conclude, which could be useful to tribunals, and explores the determination on the beginning of economic collapses as a risk-sharing tool and shows how decisions of the Argentinean saga have achieved this result.

This article introduces a new dataset on the intellectual property (IP) provisions included in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and makes it available for research and policy communities alike. Several PTAs include IP commitments that go well beyond the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). A sound knowledge of these TRIPs-plus commitments is essential in order to improve our understanding of what drives them and of their legal, social, and economic consequences. Yet, until now, these provisions have not been mapped in a comprehensive and systematic way. The T + PTA dataset fills this gap by documenting the existence of 90 types of IP provisions in 126 agreements signed between 1991 and 2016. We show that, even for like-minded countries, significant variations exist in their reliance on TRIPs-plus provisions, their degree of consistency across PTAs, and their preferences for some IP rights. We also find that strong TRIPs-Plus provisions are correlated with the depth of PTAs, the asymmetry between trade partners, and the strength of their domestic IP law. By making the T + PTA dataset available, we hope to create the opportunity for a new generation of research on TRIPs-plus agreements.

For a multilateral system to be sustainable, it is important to have several escape clauses which can allow countries to protect their national security concerns. However, when these escape windows are too wide or ambiguous, defining their ambit and scope becomes challenging yet crucial to ensure that they are not open to misuse. The recent Panel Ruling in Russia – Measures Concerning Traffic in Transit is the very first attempt by the WTO to clarify the scope and ambit of National Security Exception. In this paper, we argue that the Panel has employed a combination of an objective and a subjective approach to interpret this exception. This hybrid approach to interpret GATT Article XXI (b) provides a systemic balance between the sovereign rights of the members to invoke the security exception and their right to free and open trade. But has this Ruling opened Pandora's box? In this paper, we address this issue by providing an in-depth analysis of the Panel's decision.

The WTO is exposed to significant political risks deriving from both the abusive employment of the national security argument, as well as the use of the WTO dispute settlement system to address this problem. This article explores the implications of the first WTO panel decision, adopted in April 2019, in which the argument of ‘essential security interests’ was employed to justify trade restrictions. Article XXI of the GATT 1994 now tends to be invoked in other ongoing disputes, notably by the United States in the dispute settlement cases involving its barriers to steel and aluminum. The article argues that pathways other than WTO litigation should be explored to deal with trade barriers adopted under the argument of national security and, despite the absence of simple solutions, it considers some possible alternatives.