Beef

This chapter revisits one of the most discussed cases of EU non-compliance with WTO rules; its ban on hormone-treated beef. It provides a fuller and more nuanced analysis of the case than is found in the existing literature. It covers the policy from its initial adoption through the end of 2019 and includes a discussion of the EU’s efforts to shelter its policy during the Uruguay Round negotiations. The beef hormones case is one of only two in which enforcement tariffs were imposed, with both the United States and Canada adopting tariffs. The chapter demonstrates that tariffs did not prompt affected exporters to lobby for lifting the ban, as assumed by demand-side explanations. Rather, EU policy makers, caught between a desire to comply (in order to uphold the then new WTO and avoid encouraging reciprocal abrogation) and a belief that hormone-treated beef was unsafe, sought to change the form, but not the substance, of the bans to make them WTO compatible.

Relative gains and the Common Agricultural Policy: the French government’s decision to reject the Blair House Agreement and block the completion of the Uruguay Round in 1993

CESAA 19th ANNUAL EUROPE ESSAY COMPETITION 2011 - Undergraduate winner: Dan Norrie (Monash University)The French government’s rejection of the Blair House Agreement in 1993 enabled France to resist agricultural reform and achieve relative gains over other European Union States. The existence of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) allows France to extract the economic surplus of European Union (EU) members through taxes and subsidies, which artificially improve the competitiveness of French agriculture. France took advantage of the EU principle of consensus by adopting a strategy of non-compliance to agricultural negotiations, positioning it to directly influence EU Commission policy. This allowed France to benefit from EU bargaining power in the Uruguay Round, and ensure greater concessions from States driving agricultural reform. The reinstatement of veto power in the EU Community has made future agricultural reform more difficult, allowing France to continue to realise welfare gains at the expense of other EU members. The paper adopts a literature review to analyse French national interest and the costs and benefits of foreign policy strategies.

A DIPLOMACIA MULTILATERAL: DISSENSOS E CONTRASTES. DOIS CASOS GENEBRINOS. UM DEPOIMENTO PESSOAL.

In the multilateral negotiating context in Geneva, developed countries seek, often aggressively, to impose agendas that are more favorable to their interests. This text seeks to expose, from the perspective of developing countries, and Brazil in particular, the difficulties inherent in multilateral work at the time they were experienced, as well as the efforts to overcome them. The focus of attention is modulated, sometimes focusing on the GATT (institution that preceded the WTO) and the negotiations on the new themes of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations (1986-1994), now on the nascent diplomatic articulations on the issue of the environment; or even in the negotiations on disarmament, these at a more recent moment, with the conclusion of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Quantitative Analysis of Multiparty Tariff Negotiations

We develop a model of international tariff negotiations to study the design of the institutional rules of the GATT/WTO. A key principle of the GATT/WTO is its most‐favored‐nation (MFN) requirement of nondiscrimination, a principle that has long been criticized for inviting free‐riding behavior. We embed a multisector model of international trade into a model of interconnected bilateral negotiations over tariffs and assess the value of the MFN principle. Using 1990 trade flows and tariff outcomes from the Uruguay Round of GATT/WTO negotiations, we estimate the model and use it to simulate what would happen if the MFN requirement were abandoned and countries negotiated over discriminatory tariffs. We find that if tariff bargaining in the Uruguay Round had proceeded without the MFN requirement, it would have wiped out the world real income gains that MFN tariff bargaining in the Uruguay Round produced and would have instead led to a small reduction in world real income relative to the 1990 status quo.

WTO, A Multilateral Trade Institution or a Parallel Organisation: Reform Initiatives Addressing the WTO Agricultural Trade Distortions to Developing Countries

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) process and its ethos are fast losing their development objectives. The crisis, challenges and complexities in the implementation of WTO policies on agriculture and market access has not abated. Intellectuals, researchers and academics opine that the implementation of WTO policies have not only encouraged power and development divide between the Industrialised nations and the developing nations, it has worsened the rate of global economic inequality. Although the inclusion of agriculture in the Uruguay Round was taken as a major achievement, the commitment to minimum market access for most protected products, reducing export subsidies and a considerable measure of support, did not do much to lower agricultural protection. The promises made to the developing countries under the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) on agriculture, market access, reduction of subsidies/tariffs and implementation issues were limited and not fulfilled. Can the emerging WTO market capacities and alliances lead to a change in the decision-making process? This writing aims to critically analyse the existing WTO legal problems hindering market flows and the incidence of barriers to trade in agriculture being much higher than protection of developing countries farmers which has impacted their development.+ Keywords: WTO; Legal; Agriculture; Implementation; Inequality; Developing Countries; Doha Development Agenda; Decision-marking; Market Access; Development.+

What do I get? How do states’ negotiation alternatives influence the concessions they receive in multilateral negotiations?

When will states receive concessions in multilateral negotiations? And on which issues are those concessions likely to be received? I highlight two factors that influence the likelihood a state will receive concessions on an issue in multilateral negotiations: (1) the degree to which the issues linked together in the negotiation are “differently valued” by the negotiating states, and (2) the costliness of states’ “best alternative to a negotiated agreement” on each individual issue. The former creates the opportunity for an exchange of concessions; the latter creates the incentive for that exchange to occur. It is the interaction of having more differently valued issues on the table and having a more costly best alternative to a negotiated agreement on an issue that makes a state more likely to receive concessions on that issue. This argument stands in contrast to the standard negotiation literature, which has shown that having a more beneficial best alternative to a negotiated agreement will yield greater concessions. I argue that these contradictory assertions exist because there are two types of best alternatives to a negotiated agreement that must be taken into account – one at the negotiation level and those at the issue-specific level. The current literature has tended to focus on the former while I focus on the latter. I test my argument on an originally constructed dataset of concessions states received in the Uruguay Round trade negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. For each issue in the Round, I coded the costliness of each state's issue-specific best alternative to a negotiated agreement and the level of concessions it received on that issue. The results provide insights into the workings of multilateral negotiations.