Dispute Settlement System

O princípio do desenvolvimento sustentável na imposição de barreiras climáticas unilaterais ao comércio internacional de bens

One of the prominent ways through which trading communities across the globe have increased their cross-border trade is by eliminating various barriers to the trade which are customarily encountered in the form of tariff barriers and contemporarily in the form of Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs). Trade facilitation measures aim at removing or minimising barriers to trade and to bring transparency, procedural minimalism and regulatory uniformity in bilateral, regional and multilateral trade transactions amongst the trading partners. It also balances the legitimate regulatory concerns of different nations by improving the regulatory interface between the state authorities and overseas traders. For economists and trade law scholars, the existence of trade barriers is the ‘hardware issue’ of international trade which until resolved will make the software up-gradation in international trade regime in the form of policy instrument ineffective. The intra-regional trade in the South Asian region has always been dismal, and on average it has been less than 5% to share of world trade from the region. Since the formation of SAARC, for the most of the 1990s, the intra-regional trade in South Asia has been less than 4%. Even after a substantial decrease in the tariff rates across the region, due to the efforts of the WTO and regional initiatives like SAPTA and SAFTA, no substantial improvement in the intra-regional trade could be achieved because of the prevalence of a large number of NTBs in the region.

Barriers to Trade and Trade Facilitation in Reference to SAARC Region

Due to the current complexity of international trade regulatory framework, our aim is to propose a new theoretical approach that allows the analysis of the different systems of rules that intervene in commercial activities. Such approach is necessary in face of the new challenges in formulating Brazil’s International Trade Policy. RESUMO Diante da atual complexidade do quadro regulatorio sobre o comercio internacional, o objetivo deste artigo e propor uma nova abordagem teorica que permita o exame dos diferentes sistemas de regras que intervem nas atividades comerciais. Tal abordagem se faz cada vez mais necessaria em face dos novos desafios enfrentados na formulacao da politica de comercio internacional do Brasil. 1 A NEW APPROACH TO INTERNATIONAL TRADE REGULATION Activities related to international trade represent an increasingly significant part of the development process of Brazil. In the global scenario, the country stands out among the twenty biggest importers and exporters of goods. Domestically, the activities related to trade have been growing and, nowadays, they represent about 25% of the GDP. The presence of Brazil in the services area still has little significance, but its participation has been increasing. Brazil’s role as an actor in the international trade scenario has been growing due to a framework of accelerated development and expansion of the internal market. The Country has turned into a great exporter of value-added agricultural products, so as of a wide range of industrial products. At the same time, due to its economical and political stability, it acquired a presence of increasingly importance in several international economic forums. * The assistant researchers of the Centro do Comercio Global e Investimento Adriane Nakagawa and Daniel Fornaziero Segura Ramos contributed to this article. The opinions demonstrated in this article are solely of the author’s responsibility. ** Professor and Reseacher of the Escola de Economia de Sao Paulo (EESP/FGV) and coordinator of the Centro de Estudos do Comercio Global e do Investimento. 84 The Perspective of the World Review | v. 3 | n. 1 | Apr. 2011 The major question being asked is how to define international trade and which elements must be included in the policy agenda for foreign trade. Nowadays, the activities related to trade aren’t comprised only of exports and imports of agricultural and industrial goods, but also of a wide range of services, that include the most diverse sectors, such as financial, telecommunications, transportation, distribution, construction, tourism, as well as professional services. It is increasingly harder to separate the economical activities connected to the production of goods to the ones related to the performance of services. Even more, the expansion of economical activities depends not only on the interaction between different international actors, but it is also subject to several policies that reflect determinants of economical nature. Determinants that are broader than the ones related to pure trade, but essential to its execution, such as international and national regulations for investments, competition, intellectual property rights, concerns about the environment and climate change, labor and human rights. It is also important to highlight the role of the regulation of transnationals firms’ trade and its impact in global value chains. This is the global view of the governance of international trade, which has been redefined as global trade. In today’s world, political and economical conflicts are solved by a wide range of rules and regulations that are negotiated between the main international actors and, more recently, involving a large number of countries. With arduously agreed rules, the supervision mechanisms for the execution of these regulations and political-legal systems (diplomatic-legal) for dispute settlement, the stability and the predictability of the international system regulations have been allowing longer economical growth periods. Since the 1950’s and throughout the last few years, the negotiations of different regulatory frameworks for global trade have been taking place in different forums. The most comprehensive milestone, in terms of the number of parties involved and of its evolution, is the multilateral trade system, initiated with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade – GATT, and that now has the World Trade Organization (WTO) as reference. At the same time, over the years, there has been an increase on the expressive number of regional, bilateral and non-reciprocal regulatory frameworks, through preferential agreements, that includes countries from several regions or distant partners, but with more intense commercial interests. Ultimately, great international partners also define regulatory frameworks for trade by establishing their own policies, following and expanding the multilateral and preferential frameworks, under pressure of the main political and economical agents. 85 The Multisystem of Global Trade Regulation These three great regulatory systems comprehend the most diverse operating areas of global governance, related to trade or, even if they’re not directly linked to trade, that end up affecting it. All these elements have direct impact in the formulation of differente countries’ foreign trade policy, as well in the strategic decisions of economical agents. Under this point of view, both government and sector producers begun to follow more closely the evolution of regulatory frameworks defined in the multilateral scope, so as the regulations negotiated in the preferential scopes (regional, bilateral, non-reciprocal) and certain national policies that might impact on the definition of each country’s foreign trade policy and of the competitivity in productive sectors. The analysis of the issues linked to international trade and to investments, therefore, demands a broader view, that is, a multisystem view of global trade. To summarize it, the most relevant issues on global trade and investment field now demand not only a more comprehensive theoretical reference, but also a more integrated methodological analysis that takes into consideration the several sources of international trade regulations. Thus, the aim of this paper is to propose a new conceptual approach for the study of trade regulations – through the multisystem of global trade regulation – and a new analysis methodology for specific products or sectors – the crossectional analysis of the global trade regulations. In other words, the new theoretical reference, the multisystem of global trade, must comprehend the rules of the multilateral system, including: i) the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other organizations and international conventions directly or indirectly related to trading, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations (UN) and its affiliates – the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); the International Labour Organization (ILO); United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) etc; ii) the preferential systems (regional, bilateral, non-reciprocal) centered in the most important economic poles; and iii) the national systems, including the trade policies, the decisive structures and the instruments of the main international trade partners instruments (picture 1). 86 The Perspective of the World Review | v. 3 | n. 1 | Apr. 2011 PICTURE 1 Multisystem of the global trade regulation

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The Multisystem of global trade regulation : proposal for a new theoretical reference anda new analysis methodology

There is no doubt that the continued trade interaction between States is bound to give rise to disputes. In this respect the provisions of Article 3.2 of the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing Settlement of Disputes provides that the dispute settlement system of the [World Trade Organization] is a central element in providing security and predictability of the multilateral trading system as presented in the Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral trade Negotiations in 1999. This study is a probe into the functionality of the Dispute Settlement System. The paper describes the WTO dispute settlement system highlighting its objectives and its effectiveness. The study further looks into the bodies involved during the processes identifying their procedural roles. The implementation process and the Surveillance Stage is further examined to establish the System’s effectiveness. The author deems this paper relevant as it gives insight of how the Dispute Settlement System works.

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Dispute Settlement System

Citations

O princípio do desenvolvimento sustentável na imposição de barreiras climáticas unilaterais ao comércio internacional de bens

Barriers to Trade and Trade Facilitation in Reference to SAARC Region

The Multisystem of global trade regulation : proposal for a new theoretical reference anda new analysis methodology

Functionality of the Dispute Settlement System: A world Trade Organization's (WTO) Approach

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