Trade Policy Note Final-rev08 - Development

extended trade obligations into new areas such as national policies on services (e.g.
finance, communications, energy, environment, culture, immigration, transportation,
health and education) and intellectual property rights. Those countries which have
acceded to the WTO after its establishment find themselves subject to even greater
constraints, as the major trading countries have followed a policy of seeking
maximum, “WTO plus” concessions in their terms of accession.
Box 1: Terms of Accession 3
Countries that have acceded to the WTO have been obliged to accept WTO-plus obligations
and commitments as part of their terms of accession. These have included across the board
tariff bindings often at low rates, extensive commitments on trade in services, going far
beyond those made by developing countries in the Uruguay Round, lack of recourse to
permitted TRIMs (e.g. on transfer of technology), abolition of export taxes, little or no
recourse to special safeguards inn agriculture, additional commitments on energy prices in
excess of the normal WTO disciplines on subsidies, no access to export subsidies even when
their GDP is less than $1000. Furthermore, some acceding countries have been denied full
WTO rights based on the argument that they are still in the category of “non-market
economies” Acceding countries have more recently obtained recognition that the extensive
commitments contained in their term s of accession should be taken into account in
multilateral trade negotiations.
This has constricted the policy space available to developing countries to pursue
development strategies. 4 The WTO Doha Development Round aims at continuing the
process of liberalization with tighter disciplines. However, it also provides the
opportunity for developing countries to address difficulties encountered in the
implementation of the Uruguay Round results.
Some FTAs are More Constraining
All developing countries have been caught up in the proliferation of FTAs, both with
other developing countries (South/South) and between developed and developing
countries (North/South). Some of these manifest a more ambitious approach by
developing countries to the pursuit of the traditional objective of regional integration.
Others, however, are extra-regional, reflecting strategies of individual countrie s to
seek privileged market access conditions which they consider cannot be achieved in
multilateral negotiations. For certain developed countries, the negotiation of bilateral
FTAs with developing countries has a highly political motivation. It also manifests a
strategy on their part of imposing tighter and more extensive disciplines on their
trading partner than can be achieved, at least in the near future, in the WTO, or to
consolidate positions they are pursuing multilaterally vis-à-vis other major players in
the WTO. Major trading countries are also involved in the pursuit of geopolitical
objectives through some bilateral and regional trade negotiations, while smaller
3 See, for example, UNCTAD, WTO Accessions and Development Policies (New York and Geneva:
2001). An acceding country is in a much weaker position under the WTO than it was previously under
GATT, where the possibility of invoking the non-application clause was excluded once bilateral
negotiations had been engaged.
4 UNDP et al., Making Global Trade Work for People (London and US: Earthscan, 2003)
(www.earthscan.co.uk).
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