WTO Accession Factors and Algeria’s Potential: A Comparative Study with Russia and Saudi

This paper aims to assess the factors affecting the accession to the WTO and hence evaluate Algeria’s potential to complete its accession. Literature identifies 4 principal factors that can affect the process: economical, political, commercial and institutional. Thus, a comparative and empirical study has been done based on a weighted score method, this method put all factors in the same scale from 0 to 10 points for the three countries: Algeria, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Results show that Algeria has have an acceptable rating compared to the two other countries in institutional factor, as they have average governance scores, and political, as none of the three countries is aligned with WTO major. While it is much lower than Russia in economic framework, even if Saudi Arabia is at same level, this is mainly due to lack of diversification and subsidies, especially fuel prices. In the commercial factor Algeria is far from the other two countries as it lacks many adjustments in this sector, mainly in applied tariffs, FDI, exports and PTAs. Negotiation duration is also holding back the accession process, this can become even more difficult as it extend more. In the other hand, oil prices fluctuations can enhance institutional factors while new regional trade agreement can constitute a more interesting alternative to WTO accession