Was the Way Really Long?

2012 ◽  
pp. 70-73
Author(s):  
S. Sutyrin
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Trade ◽  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Regulatory Environment ◽  
Summer Period ◽  
Reasonable Time ◽  
Trade Regime ◽  
The World ◽  
The Russian Federation

18 years summer period of negotiations on the Russian Federation joining the World Trade Organization doesn't look like something extraordinary. It is clear that there exist not any rigid, objective criteria for a candidate to match. Actually, an applicant may rather quickly become a WTO member merely having agreed to implement all required changes relating to foreign trade regime and corresponding regulatory environment within a reasonable time. In case of Russia the purpose of negotiations was to assure accession conditions acceptable for the country. The results are to be estimated in the nearest future.

Accession of the Russian Federation to the World Trade Organization: A New Player Joins the Trade Game

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 321-365
Author(s):  
Kim Van der Borght
Keyword(s):  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Political Obligations ◽  
The World ◽  
Border Dispute ◽  
Accession Process ◽  
The Russian Federation

To date, no country has taken longer to join the World Trade Organization than the Russian Federation despite the fact that the ussr (of which the Russian Federation is the legal successor) participated in the drafting conference of the Charter to the International Trade Organization, i.e., the original source of the rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the later wto. While the ussr never joined the ito, Russia finally joined the wto in 2012, eighteen years after its first application had been made. The reasons for the lengthy accession process were partially economic, as the wto was established to remove trade impediments; however, the context also was highly politicized. The economic aspects of the wto accession process are the concessions made to existing members. These entail removing the cover offered to domestic producers by opening up to international competition. This process also has political aspects, as domestic lobbies representing economic sectors likely to suffer from an increasingly competitive international environment seek compensation. The politicization is facilitated by a custom contra legem in wto decision-making procedures that gives a de facto veto to existing members. Georgia used this to reassert its position on South Osetiia and Abkhaziia. China brought a border dispute into the process, and the us entangled the process in a broad-ranging debate linked to human rights. In joining the wto, a dual process of domestic and international negotiations results in the final package of commitments to which an acceding member needs to agree as it joins the wto. Part of our focus in this article will be on key economic and political obligations that the Russian Federation took upon itself by becoming a member of the wto.

Anti-Russian Sanctions: Damage to the Countries that Declared Them

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. V. Kazantsev
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
World Community ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Primary Damage ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Political Economic

Many states, pursuing their own political, economic, financial and ideological goals, have used all sorts of non-military methods and means of coercion of other states, international unions and organisations, and economic entities to perform actions that are desirable for states declared such sanctions. Such methods and means include various restrictions, prohibitions, blockades and unjustified tariffs. When asked about the consequences of sanctions imposed on someone, they usually refer to their negative impact on those to whom they are applied. However, the undesirable consequences of sanctions are also felt by those who apply them, as well as by other members of the world community that are not involved in such measures. That is why the author of this paper tried to estimate the losses which bear the states that declared anti-Russian sanctions. It is also essential because such sanctioning countries usually adhere to the principle “don’t hurt yourself”. So, the measures they take should not cause damage to their initiators (state, companies, corporations, etc.), especially irreparable damage. The author presented in this paper some results of the assessment of sanctioning countries’ losses incurred as a result of the reduction of their exports to Russia and imports from the Russian Federation. As a statistical basis for the calculations, the author used the data of the World Trade Organization for 2012–2017. The author has shown that the primary damage from the implementation of anti-Russian sanctions in the sphere of foreign trade in 2014–2017 was incurred not by their initiators, but by the countries that joined them. First of all, this applies to those countries that have developed more significant foreign trade relations with the Russian Federation, that is, who is more dependent on the volume of Russian exports and imports.

scholarly journals Ten Years Ago, the World Trade Organization Opened Its Doors to Russia

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 220-237
Author(s):  
Alexey Portanskiy ◽  
◽  
Evgeniy Galchenko ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
World Trade ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Negotiation Process ◽  
Russian Economy ◽  
The World ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Modern Services

This article begins with a brief discussion of the background of the USSR/Russia rapprochement with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO) and some of the acute problems of the negotiation process. It is argued that the Russian Federation has received acceptable, balanced conditions of membership. The advantages gained during the first years of WTO membership are listed, both for the national economy and in the foreign arena. However, it is shown that, 10 years later, the benefits of membership are significantly lower in comparison with initial projections. This gap is attributed to the state of the Russian economy and the extinction of the continuing economic model based on the extraction and export of raw materials. The Russian economy needs real structural reforms and modernization, which would change the structure of exports in favour of finished products and modern services. Only in this case can the benefits of WTO membership increase significantly, justifying the original forecast. The article concludes with a discussion of current challenges in the world economy and trade, the crisis experienced by the WTO, and the active position of the Russian Federation on the future reform of the WTO.

Does Flexibility Promote Cooperation? An Application to the Global Trade Regime

2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Kucik ◽  
Eric Reinhardt
Keyword(s):  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
World Trade ◽  
International Agreements ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
Trade Regime ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
The World

Do flexibility provisions in international agreements—clauses allowing for legal suspension of concessions without abrogating the treaty—promote cooperation? Recent work emphasizes that provisions for relaxing treaty commitments can ironically make states more likely to form agreements and make deeper concessions when doing so. This argument has particularly been applied to the global trade regime, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Yet the field has not produced much evidence bearing on this claim. Our article applies this claim to the global trade regime and its chief flexibility provision, antidumping. In contrast to prior work, this article explicitly models the endogeneity and selection processes envisioned by the theory. We find that states joining the WTO are more likely to adopt domestic antidumping mechanisms. Likewise, corrected for endogeneity, states able to take advantage of the regime's principal flexibility provision, by having a domestic antidumping mechanism in place, are significantly more likely to (1) join the WTO, (2) agree to more tightly binding tariff commitments, and (3) implement lower applied tariffs as well.

scholarly journals Evaluation of the Sanctions Impact on Sanctioning Countries’ Trade with Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. V. Kazantsev
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mathematical Tool ◽  
External Trade ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Impact

The aim of this paper was to present some results of the study of the impact of the sanctions, imposed on the Russian Federation in 2014 and consistently expanded and deepened, not on Russia, but on those who use these sanctions — the countries that imposed the sanctions (the sanctioners). External trade, that is one of the objects of the sanctions, was chosen as the subject of the study. The author’s task was to estimate the role of the Russian Federation in the external trade of the countries, which use the sanctions against Russia, before and after the sanctions, and to evaluate the harm caused to these countries by their sanctions and by Russia’s counter-sanctions. To solve these problems, the author proposed a mathematical tool for the damage quantitative assessment. The World Trade Organization statistics for 2012–2017 formed a database for the study, and economic-mathematical and statistical methods were taken as research instruments. One may summarize the results of the study as follows. First, Russia plays an insignificant role in foreign trade of most countries that imposed sanctions against the Russian Federation. However, the damage from the sanctions and counter-sanctions for some of them turns out to be quite significant. Second, the negative impact of the sanctions on their initiators in the sphere of external trade is the stronger, the more important for the sanctioning country its trade relations with the Russian Federation are. Third, the burden of the sanctions was less heavy for their main initiator — the united States of America, than for their less economically strong partners that imposed the sanctions. The author’s main conclusion is that eventually the economic interests of some of these countries win up over the political goals that go against these interests, and the volume of the foreign trade, that dropped down after the sanctions were imposed on Russia, tends to recover. Russia, shifting from the overseas markets to the domestic one and changing the geographical structure of its international trade, does continue to develop. To present the results of the study to the Russian readers, the version of the article in Russian is submitted to the journal “The World of New Economy”. Its title is “Anti-Russian Sanctions: Damage to the Countries that Declared them”. The version gives the results of the analysis of the impact of sanctions on technology trade and the content of the study of foreign trade in goods, detailed in this paper.

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