Three decades of trade concerns at the Committee on Market Access: Evolution, repetition, and cross-body diffusion (1995-2025)

This paper examines how trade concern discussions in the WTO Committee on Market Access (CMA) have evolved over three decades. It studies 138 CMA trade concerns discussed between 1995 and 2025, using the WTO Trade Concerns Database, official WTO records, and statement-level text from CMA minutes. It analyses both the substance of the issues raised and the recorded form of Members' interventions, and uses related CTG minutes to examine whether CMA concerns and language also appear in the broader Goods Council. The paper documents a marked increase in the number of trade concerns, statements, and volume of recorded text, especially since the mid-2010s and more visibly after 2020. It shows that the CMA agenda has broadened beyond tariffs, taxation, quantitative restrictions, and licensing to include a wider set of non-tariff, regulatory, and administrative measures affecting trade in goods, some of which overlap with the work of other WTO bodies. The textual analysis, based on word counts, Jaccard n-gram similarity, and TF-IDF cosine similarity, shows that CMA statements have become longer and more repetitive, mainly through paraphrased reuse rather than near-verbatim copying. It also finds substantial overlap between CMA and CTG discussions, suggesting that some concerns acquire cross-body visibility not only as agenda items, but also through the framing used by Members. Exploratory analysis indicates that repetition is associated particularly with concern maturity and institutional diffusion, while issue type plays a weaker role. The findings provide a descriptive empirical perspective on how WTO Members use regular bodies to record, revisit, and transmit trade concerns before, alongside, or instead of formal dispute settlement under the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU).