Regional Trade Agreements in the World Trade Order
A total of 178 Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) is registered with the World Trade Organization (WTO)1 at present. Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the WTO, expects this number to rise to 400 notified RTAs within the next two to three years.2 Most activel
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A total of 178 Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) is registered with the World Trade Organization (WTO)1 at present. Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the WTO, expects this number to rise to 400 notified RTAs within the next two to three years.2 Most actively pursued are regional integration initiatives in Europe, the Middle-East and Northern Africa (MENA), North and Central America, Southeast Asia, China, Japan and South Korea. Latin America, Central and Southern Africa and the former Soviet Union have signed only a very small number of RTAs. The integration agreements have developed over time essentially within four phases. A first move towards integration occurred in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, on the one hand to foster peace and political stability between the former wartime enemies, and on the other hand to overcome the economic problems of the post-war period. The European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) date back to these years, as does their expansion to other European and Mediterranean-bordering countries. A second wave of free trade agreements followed after the failure of the 1982 Ministerial Conference of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in Geneva. As a reaction to the refusal of the US proposal for a new trade round under the GATT, the United States turned purposefully towards regional trade agreements. The results of this realignment were the Caribbean Basin Initiative (1984), the USA–Israel Agreement (1985)
R. Senti ETH, Weinbergstrasse 94, 8006 Zu¨rich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] *The author thanks Ms. Michaela Go¨tze for the translation of the German version of this paper, and Ms. Indira Gurbaxani for her comments on an earlier draft. 1 http://rtais.wto.org/UI/PublicMaintainRTAHome.aspx. 2 Lamy, Regional Agreements, Lecture in Bangalore/India, 17 January 2007, WTO-Homepage (effective January 2007).
C. Herrmann and J.P. Terhechte (eds.), European Yearbook of International Economic Law 2010, European Yearbook of International Economic Law, DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-78883-6_10, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
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and the USA–Canada Free Trade Agreement (1989).3 A third phase of integration involved free-trade areas in Asia. As Chien-Huei Wu points out in his contribution about integration in Asia, there were three incidents which initiated the development in Asia: firstly the Asian financial crises in 1997/1998 and the assistance of the USA and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which was felt to be insufficient at the time, secondly the progress of regional integration in Europe and North America at that time, and thirdly the unsuccessfulness of the WTO in the Doha Round.4 In this environment, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) determined an earlier than planned coming into effect of the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), as well as a close collaboration with China (2002), Japan (2003) and South Korea (2005). India, a country which used to limit itself to a small number of development agree
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