Regional Trade Agreements and the Multilateral Trading System

Acharya, Rohini
Rohini Acharya is a Counsellor with the World Trade Organization. She has a PhD in Economics and joined the WTO's Trade Policies Review Division in 1996, becoming Chief of its Regional Trade Agreements Section in January 2007. Previously she worked as Senior Research Fellow at the International Economics Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. Her work at the WTO has included the trade policy reviews of several WTO members, including Australia, Egypt, India, New Zealand and Singapore, and the first Trade Policy Review of China.

The book explores bilateral and regional trade agreements and examines how they are changing international trade rules. It offers an important contribution to the current debate on the role of the WTO in regulating international trade and how WTO rules relate to new rules being developed by RTAs.

Part I. Trade in Goods and Services: 1. Market access provisions on trade in goods in regional trade agreements Jo-Ann Crawford; 2. Preferential rules of origin in regional trade agreements Maria Donner Abreu; 3. Trade facilitation under the RTA umbrella: origins and evolution Nora Neufeld; 4. Do regional anti-dumping regimes make a difference? Jean-Daniel Rey; 5. Mapping of safeguard provisions in regional trade agreements Jo-Ann Crawford, Jo McKeagg and Julia Tolstova; 6. Cross-cutting issues in regional trade agreements: sanitary and phytosanitary measures Lee Ann Jackson and Hanna Vitikala; 7. Technical barriers to trade provisions in regional trade agreements: to what extent do they go beyond the WTO TBT Agreement? Ana Cristina Molina and Vira Khoroshavina; 8. Services rules in regional trade agreements: how diverse and/or creative are they compared to the multilateral rules? Pierre Latrille; Part II. Other Provisions: 9. Intellectual property provisions in regional trade agreements: revision and update Raymundo Valdés and Maegan McCann; 10. Mapping of dispute settlement mechanisms in regional trade agreements - innovative or variations on a theme? Claude Chase, Alan Yanovich, Jo-Ann Crawford and Pamela Ugaz; 11. Some conclusions Rohini Acharya.