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

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

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Horn, Henrik
Mavroidis, Petros C
Sapir, André

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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 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, 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 a more of enforceable WTO-X provisions than do the EC agreements; and (iii) US agreements tend to emphasize regulatory areas more compared to EC agreements.

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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number 7317.

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Date of creation: Jun 2009
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Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:7317

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
F15 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Economic Integration
K33 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - International Law

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

NEP-ALL-2009-06-17 (All new papers)

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This page was last updated on 2009-11-25.

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