Trade Agreements

7 Key excerpts on "Trade Agreements"

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  The Foreign Trade of China

  Policy, Law, and Practice

  • Gene T. Hsiao(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  The bulk of the remaining economic agreements concern trade and payments, and the rest are economic aid and technical cooperation accords, general conditions for delivery, agreements on the registration of trademarks, and miscellaneous others. Definition and Designation Borrowing from the writings of F. I. Kozhevnikov, a Soviet jurist, the Peking Foreign Trade College defined a treaty as " a document between two or more states concerning the establishment, amendment, or termination of their sovereign rights and obligations," and " a typical and most widespread legal form in the realm of political, economic, and other relations between states." 10 On the basis of this general definition, a trade treaty or agreement is described as " a written agreement between two or more sovereign states concerning the regulation of the mutual economic and trade relations of natural and juristic persons of the contracting states as well as those relations between the governments of the contracting states themselves." 11 From among a dozen treaty designations defined by Soviet jurists, 12 the Chinese have enumerated and elaborated upon six: (1) treaty (t'iao-yueh), a most important international document regulating the political, economic, or other relations of the contracting states; (2) agreement (hsieh-ting), a treaty regulating certain special or temporary problems of the contracting states; (3) convention (kung-yueh) or pact (chuan-yueh), a multilateral agreement con- cerning certain specific problems; (4) declaration (hsuan-yen), a general statement concerning the international relations and the general principles of international law recognized by the interested states, sometimes including concrete obligations (such as the 1856 Paris Declaration on the Abolition of Privateering, and the December 1, 1943, Cairo Declaration); 13 (5) protocol 8. See Hungdah Chiù, The People's Republic of China and the Law of Treaties.

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  A Dictionary of International Trade Organizations and Agreements

  • Patrick Holden(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  International Trade Organizations and Agreements: an Introduction

  PATRICK HOLDEN

  International trade and international Trade Agreements have played a fundamental role in world history, but international trade organizations and truly multilateral/global Trade Agreements are relatively new. In the contemporary era, and especially since the end of the Cold War, the spread of regional and multilateral Trade Agreements has intensified. This is illustrated by the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the growth of new regional trading blocs, such as NAFTA and Mercosur, and the deepening of existing trading blocs, such as the European Union (EU). Furthermore, the reach of such agreements, the constraints they place on government policy and their impact on people’s lives has become increasingly apparent. In 2009 the Democratic Party achieved control of the Presidency and the Congress in the world’s only superpower. Yet the ‘Buy America’ provisions, added by the Democratic Congress to the economic stimulus package proposed by Barack Obama’s Administration, had to be moderated because they conflicted with WTO law. In Europe, club football was forever changed by the European Court of Justice’s famous Bosman ruling in 1995, on footballers’ right to transfer clubs. Clearly, very many political, economic and social phenomena are shaped by the web of international Trade Agreements. Such ‘trade’ agreements have developed out of policies and procedures ranging from regulating tariffs and other aspects of customs administrations to setting rules for a wide range of social and economic activities, which may affect trade. This is an inherently expansive agenda, as just about anything may be deemed to affect trade. The apogee of this dynamic, thus far, may well be the WTO’s TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement, which goes so far as to define which forms of life may be patented. As a result of this, Trade Agreements have unprecedented salience in public life. The WTO is viewed as a vector of globalization, and it was a WTO Ministerial Conference (Seattle 1999) that witnessed the public birth of the ‘anti-globalization’ movement. Yet it would be very wrong to assume that WTO and other agreements entirely override the state. One reason for the complexity, and opacity, of such agreements is the range of exceptions and derogations offered to states. For example, a core principle of the GATT/WTO is that members should be granted ‘most favoured nation’ status: this means that any trade concession that a state offers to one member should be offered to all members. Yet the WTO permits its members to join entities such as the EU, NAFTA and Mercosur, whose core function is directly contradictory to this: they provide their members with better market access than is accorded to outside countries. The major purpose of this dictionary is to offer the reader a concise analysis of the powers and limitations of these agreements and organizations.

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  Handbook of Commercial Policy

  • Kyle Bagwell, Robert W. Staiger(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • North Holland

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7

  The Purpose of Trade Agreements

  G.M. Grossman1     

  1 Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States

  Abstract

  In this chapter, I review the literature on governments’ motivations for negotiating and joining international Trade Agreements. I discuss both normative explanations for Trade Agreements and explanations based on political-economy concerns. Most of the chapter focuses on the purpose of multilateral agreements, but I do discuss briefly the reasons we might see governments forming preferential or regional Trade Agreements that exclude some countries.

  Keywords

  Trade Agreements; Trade pacts; International cooperation; Multilateralism; Regionalism

  JEL Classification

  F13; F53; K33

  1 Introduction

  Britain and France inked the first modern trade agreement on January 23, 1860. The so-called Cobden-Chevalier Treaty promised that France would eliminate all import prohibitions on British manufactured goods while capping most duties at 30% (25% after 1865). Britain in turn agreed to remove import barriers entirely from all but 48 French commodities while reducing dramatically its tariffs on French wine and brandy (Ashley, 1904 ). Notably, each country promised to grant the other most-favored-nation (MFN) consideration with regard to any tariff concessions it might subsequently grant to other trading partners. There followed a veritable explosion of bilateral trade pacts, with an additional 56 treaties having been signed within 15 years. By 1875, virtually all of Europe was party to a low-tariff zone by dint of a web of agreements that included the linchpin MFN clause.

  When the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) went into effect on January 1, 1948, it marked the first of a sequence of multilateral Trade Agreements. The GATT incorporated more than 45,000 tariff concessions by its original 23 signatories, while also providing a broader framework for regulating international trade. Seven subsequent “rounds” of negotiations by these and additional participants led to innumerable further tariff cuts and to the introduction of rules governing various nontariff barriers to trade. The Uruguay Round, which was signed by 123 “contracting parties” and took effect on January 1, 1995, created the World Trade Organization (WTO), while also extending trade rules to many services, harmonizing treatment of intellectual property, and establishing procedures for dispute settlement. By November 30, 2015, the WTO had grown to include 162 members that together conduct more than 96% of world trade.a Meanwhile, the multilateral agreement lives side-by-side with 267 different bilateral and regional Trade Agreements that the WTO reported to be in effect as of February 1, 2016.b

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  Regional Economic Integration and Dispute Settlement in East Asia

  The Evolving Legal Framework

  • Anna G Tevini(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  246 Finally, Annex 3 of the WTO Agreement established the so-called Trade Policy Review Mechanism (‘TPRM’), which requires Members annually to report their trade policies and practices to the newly created Trade Policy Review Body. 247 In parallel to the WTO Members’ information duties, there is an information duty of the WTO towards its Members, which is handled by the WTO Secretariat. 248 V. ECONOMIC INTEGRATION THROUGH REGIONAL Trade Agreements While the WTO Agreement regulates economic integration at the multilateral level, formal economic integration at the regional level is regulated by RTAs. A. Definition and Terminology RTAs shall be defined as formally binding agreements between two or more States or independent customs territories directed at enhancing and/or achieving full or par-tial economic integration through the reciprocal 249 reduction or elimination of trade barriers between the signatory States. 250 As agreements which aim at ‘managed free trade’ among a small group of nations, RTAs stand in contrast to the two opposing trade policies of unilateral tariff reductions, on the one hand, and free trade through multilateral negotiations under the umbrella of the WTO, on the other hand. 251 Economic Integration Through Regional Trade Agreements 39 252 See in more detail ch I s V.B.ii below 253 See Bhagwati and Panagariya (1996), 1, 42. See also Winters (1999), 7, 8. 254 However, bilateral agreements may include more than two countries when one or both of the parties are RTAs themselves (eg the EU-Mexico Free Trade Agreement of December 1997). 255 Example for an ‘intra-regional’ RTA include the European Union or the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). An example for an ‘inter-regional’ RTA is the Free Trade Agreement between South Korea and Chile. 256 See, eg, the European Communities, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the Andean Pact, the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and its successor, the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA).

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  Legal and Economic Principles of World Trade Law

  • Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Why the WTO? 35 incompleteness” of Trade Agreements will be discussed in more detail in the accompanying ALI study on the treatment of domestic instruments in the GATT. 2.3.4.4 Trade Agreements Involve Reciprocal Exchanges of Concessions The final property of the design of Trade Agreements that we will point to is that they entail reciprocal reductions in tariffs, and other trade barriers. In theory, it would be possible to have nonreciprocal agreements. Indeed, each pair of countries could negotiate a separate agreement for each tariff line and for each trade direction, with each such agreement specifying a tariff reduc- tion against, say, a monetary payment. The fact that virtually all agreements we observe involve reciprocal undertakings to reduce trade barriers, strongly sug- gests that there are efficiency gains from reciprocal exchanges that are not cap- tured in the model above. The economic literature offers surprisingly little by way of explanation of this feature, however. But it seems quite clear intuitively that it would be extremely costly to negotiate separate agreements for each trade bar- rier, since this would involve significant duplication of negotiation efforts and other resources; for instance, each of the agreements would then require a sepa- rate dispute-settlement mechanism. Furthermore, the payments require the col- lection of tax revenue, which is likely to distort the economy. In addition, the par- ties need to agree on the monetary value of each tariff concession, which might be more difficult than to agree on reciprocal tariff reductions. There are thus clear gains in terms of reduced administrative costs and negotiation costs to form a package of tariff reductions. 2.4 A Special Case: The National Market Power Model The effects of government’s economic policies cross international bound- aries and impact actors residing outside their political borders.

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  Core Documents on International Law 2022-23

  • Karen Hulme(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  needs of their economic development, BEING DESIROUS of contributing to these objectives by entering into reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements directed to the substantial reduction of tariffs and other barriers to trade and to the elimination of discriminatory treatment in international trade relations, RESOLVED, therefore, to develop an integrated, more viable and durable multilateral trading system encompassing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the results of past trade liberalization efforts, and all of the results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations, DETERMINED to preserve the basic principles and to further the objectives underlying this multilateral trading system, AGREE as follows: Article I Establishment of the Organization The World Trade Organization (hereinafter referred to as ‘the WTO’) is hereby established .Article II Scope of the WTO 1 .The WTO shall provide the common institutional framework for the conduct of trade relations among its Members in matters related to the agreements and associated legal instruments included in the Annexes to this Agreement .2 .The agreements and associated legal instruments included in Annexes 1, 2 and 3 (hereinafter referred to as ‘Multilateral Trade Agreements’) are integral parts of this Agreement, binding on all Members .*Source: http://www .wto .org/english/docs_e/legal_e/04-wto .pdf .Reproduced with the permission of the World Trade Organization .

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  Russia and the World Trade Organization

  • P. Naray(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 Accession of Non-Market Economies to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade The GATT came into existence as a trade policy instrument for econo- mies where trade decisions were made on the basis of business con- siderations. The original contracting parties were all market economies. The Soviet Union, the only major non-market economy at that time, chose neither to be a signatory of the Charter of the International Trade Organization (ITO) nor the GATT. The United States, during the drafting stage of the ITO, acting in a spirit of compromise and tolerance towards the centralized Soviet eco- nomic system, made some attempts to bridge the gap between the centrally planned nature of the Soviet Union, its wartime ally, and the market-oriented spirit of the future international economic order. The Suggested Charter for an International Trade Organization of the United Nations, prepared by the United States, included the follow- ing provision for dealing with countries with complete foreign trade monopolies: Any member establishing or maintaining a complete or substan- tially complete monopoly of its import trade shall promote the expansion of its foreign trade with the other members in conso- nance with the purposes of the Charter. To this end such member shall negotiate with the other members an arrangement under which, in conjunction with the granting of tariff concessions by such other members, and in consideration of the other benefits of this Chapter, it shall undertake to import in the aggregate over a 1 2 Russia and the World Trade Organization period products of the other members valued at not less than an amount to be agreed upon. This purchase arrangement shall be subject to periodic adjustment.

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