Deepening of Multilateral Integration in the WTO

The liberalization of world trade is an ongoing process. There is a tradition of many decades dedicated to bringing trade barriers down through multilateral negotiations in the framework of the GATT, which has been continued in the WTO since 1995. Tariffs and quantitative restrictions (QRs) were singled out as the most important factors hampering trade. However, to the extent this trade liberalization has been successful, other barriers have become more important as bottlenecks for trade flows. These other barriers are largely the consequence of public regulation of markets. In order to continue multilateral economic liberalization, these regulatory barriers have been the object of trade negotiations, as have the further lowering of tariffs and quantitative restrictions. This shift in multilateral trade talks has changed the nature of the negotiations. In the past, trade liberalization mainly affected the relative protection of sectors, the area of industrial policy. In the new situation, environmental, social, consumer, public health, and cultural policies are drawn into the negotiations as these policies lead to regulatory barriers. This complicates trade negotiations. The number of potential conflicts has increased many times and tradeoffs have become more difficult as different policy areas cannot easily be compared. Groups of countries have succeeded in finding ways to diminish regulatory barriers. Regional integration of this kind is called ‘deep’ integration: The existing objective of economic liberalization is realized by common regulation and policies and by constraining the powers of the participating countries.1 In the European Community (EC), deepening has occurred in the Dassonville and Cassis de Dijon rulings of the European Court of Justice in 1974 and 1979, respectively, and in the Single European Act (1985) and the Treaty of Maastricht (1991). The NAFTA agreement also contains elements of deep integration.2 This paper discusses deepening of integration at the multilateral level: the harmonization and approximation of regulatory diversity through global mechanisms.