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1) How does the WTO work? The WTO regulates more than 98 percent of global trade flows among its 164 member countries. Its job is to monitor international trade rules, reduce trade barriers, and settle disputes. Established on Jan. 1, 1995, the WTO replaced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which had regulated interstate commerce since 1948. WTO members must give each other “most-favored-nation” (MFN) status, which means a nondiscriminatory low tariff rate. So the 35 percent tariff on Mexican imports and 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports Donald Trump proposed would be a “flagrant violation” of WTO rules, according to Stanford legal scholar Alan O. Sykes. 2) Does the WTO boost trade? Yes — the WTO has succeeded in increasing trade among its members. Allison Carnegie at Columbia finds that the WTO provides an especially strong boost for trade flows between countries that are not allied geopolitically, and between nations that are different from each other in terms of geopolitical power or regime type. Recent research suggests there are additional WTO benefits, including reduced export volatility. Christina Davis at Princeton shows that international institutions like the WTO have helped reduce agricultural tariffs, which are notoriously economically inefficient and politically difficult to eliminate. 3) Are there specific benefits for the United States? U.S. exporters sell more of their goods overseas because WTO rules require nations to keep trade barriers low for other member states. For example, the original WTO agreement provided U.S. exporters greater access to European and Japanese agricultural markets. And one study finds that the U.S. government gets better results by using the WTO’s trade dispute settlement system instead of negotiating with other countries directly. The U.S. filed a WTO dispute to save jobs — by increasing imports from China. Here’s why. 4) Does the WTO cause U.S. job losses? Trump has blamed the WTO, and especially China’s entry to the WTO, for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Economists Justin Pierce and Peter Schott do find some correlation between China’s WTO entry in December 2001 and the loss of U.S. jobs in the medical equipment and apparel sectors. But WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo notes a number of studies show that most U.S. job losses actually resulted from changes in technology or efficiency. And China’s entry into the WTO benefited American consumers by decreasing the prices of manufactured goods. Ultimately, the U.S. may face a trade-off between protecting U.S. manufacturing jobs and enabling consumers to save money by purchasing cheap imports from trading partners like China. 5) Does the WTO manage trade disputes fairly? WTO members agree to settle their trade disagreements within the organization’s trade dispute settlement system, which is designed to be unbiased. But evidence suggests that the WTO system may favor U.S. and European Union exporters. One paper finds WTO dispute settlement panels actually moderated the scope of judgments against the E.U. and the United States — the organization’s most powerful members. Moreover, the United States has pushed to keep the WTO panel more pro-American. The U.S. is causing a major controversy in the World Trade Organization. Here’s what’s happening. 6) What are the biggest challenges to the WTO? Maintaining an “open” global trading system hasn’t been easy. Countries around the world imposed more than 2,500 trade restrictions after the onset of the global financial crisis in October 2008 — and three-quarters of these restrictions remained in place at the end of 2015. For the first time in decades, protectionism has outpaced liberalization. Between November 2013 and May 2014, Group of 20 countries undertook 112 protectionist acts, while moving forward on just 98 measures to liberalize trade. Protectionist measures like trade-distorting subsidies contributed to the 2015 fall in volume and value of the global trade in goods and services. In another setback to the WTO, the most recent round of multilateral trade talks (the Doha Round) failed to reduce existing trade barriers and eliminate agricultural subsidies. Journalist Paul Blustein argues that the “failure of … the Doha Round … dealt a serious blow to the organization’s credibility.” 7) Can countries leave the WTO? Article XV of the WTO agreement spells out the exit process — a country must submit written notice of its withdrawal to the WTO Director-General, and this notice will go into effect six months later. The United States originally joined the WTO through the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, which passed the House and Senate with overwhelming support in 1994. Under Section 125 of this law, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is obligated to submit a report to Congress every five years about the positives and negatives of American involvement in the WTO. After the USTR submits its report, any member of Congress can introduce a joint resolution calling for withdrawal from the WTO, which would have to pass both the House and the Senate, and be signed by the president. 8) Hypothetically speaking, how would the U.S. economy fare without the WTO? U.S. exporters would lose preferential access to many global markets if the U.S. pulled its WTO membership — and American consumers would likely see higher prices of many imported goods. The United States has free trade agreements with 20 countries, but these agreements cover only 40 percent of American trade. A lot of people want to restrict free trade. But that would have serious trade-offs. Trade has become an increasingly important part of the U.S. economy over the last few decades. In 1960, trade represented about 9 percent of American GDP; in 2015, trade was nearly 30 percent of U.S. GDP. Given the current importance of interstate exchange for the U.S. economy, rescinding WTO membership could have huge effects on American workers and consumers. A U.S. withdrawal from the WTO would likely mean increased protectionism around the world. Economist Douglas A. Irwin explains, “When the United States imposed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930, it helped set off a worldwide movement toward higher tariffs … the combined effect was a deeper global economic slump.” If history is a good indicator, a U withdrawal from the WTO would be a severe shock not only to the United States, but also to the multilateral trading system, and to the global economy as a whole.

In 1999 the Oslo Peace Research Institute issued a ground-breaking paper by Indra de Soysa and Nils Gleditsch which drew attention to the fact that, in the first decade of the post-Cold War era, most conflicts began with develop- ment failure and contests between the different players over those fundamen- tal resources for life: food, land and water. “The new internal wars, extremely bloody in terms of civilian casualties, reflect subsistence crises and are largely apolitical,” they said (De Soya and Gleditsch 1999). This represented a chal- lenge to the long-held academic view that scarcity is a product of war—rather than war a being product of scarcity. In fact, humans have always contested key resources vi et armis—and politics, religion, patriotism and ethnicity are just the way we tend to marshal ourselves into opposing groups around them. Peter Gleick’s work on water conflicts lends substance to the warnings of two UN chiefs, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Ban Ki-Moon, of the increased danger of wars breaking out over this indispensable resource as scarcity takes hold. ‘Food wars’ (including so-called ‘fish wars’) have erupted on numerous occasions in Africa—where the Rwandan genocide and drawn-out bloody con- flicts in Darfur and the Horn of Africa are particular examples—but also in Central America and Asia (Messer et al. 1998). These fights are almost always over the fundamentals of human survival and tend to originate as civil conflicts, which then spiral out of control to embroil neighbour states and even the superpowers.

In the emerging era of resource instability, described in Chap. 3, the risk of war is liable to increase in proportion to the scarcity of essential resources, be they water, farm land, food itself, oil, gas or strategic minerals. The possibiity that some of these conflicts will involve the discharge of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons cannot be discounted. For example, in their Age of Consequences report, Kurt Campbell and colleagues at the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) foreshadowed that with the famines and global disruption arising out of severe climate change (2.6 °C, in their sce- nario) “It is clear that even nuclear war cannot be excluded as a political consequence. Moreover, so-called “limited nuclear war” in any part of the world can escalate to a full-scale nuclear exchange among the big nuclear powers.” With catastrophic change of 5° or more, “The probability of conflict between two destabilized nuclear powers would seem high.” Furthermore “Armed conflict between nations over resources and even territory, such as the Nile and tributaries, is likely, and nuclear war is possible” (Campbell et al. 2007).

Humanity faces ‘devastating domino effects’ including mass displacement and financial ruin as planet warms Many of the gravest threats to humanity are drawing closer, as carbon pollution heats the planet to ever more dangerous levels, scientists have warned. Five important natural thresholds already risk being crossed, according to the Global Tipping Points report, and three more may be reached in the 2030s if the world heats 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures. Triggering these planetary shifts will not cause temperatures to spiral out of control in the coming centuries but will unleash dangerous and sweeping damage to people and nature that cannot be undone. “Tipping points in the Earth system pose threats of a magnitude never faced by humanity,” said Tim Lenton, from the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. “They can trigger devastating domino effects, including the loss of whole ecosystems and capacity to grow staple crops, with societal impacts including mass displacement, political instability and financial collapse.” The tipping points at risk include the collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the widespread thawing of permafrost, the death of coral reefs in warm waters, and the collapse of one oceanic current in the North Atlantic. Unlike other changes to the climate such as hotter heatwaves and heavier rainfall, these systems do not slowly shift in line with greenhouse gas emissions but can instead flip from one state to an entirely different one. When a climatic system tips – sometimes with a sudden shock – it may permanently alter the way the planet works. Scientists warn that there are large uncertainties around when such systems will shift but the report found that three more may soon join the list. These include mangroves and seagrass meadows, which are expected to die off in some regions if the temperatures rise between 1.5C and 2C, and boreal forests, which may tip as early as 1.4C of heating or as late as 5C. The warning comes as world leaders meet for the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai. On Tuesday, Climate Action Tracker estimated that their emissions targets for 2030 put the planet on track to heat 2.5C by the end of the century, despite promises from countries at a previous summit to try to limit it to 1.5C. The tipping point report, produced by an international team of 200 researchers and funded by Bezos Earth Fund, is the latest in a series of warnings about the most extreme effects of climate change. Scientists have warned that some of the shifts can create feedback loops that heat the planet further or alter weather patterns in a way that triggers other tipping points. The researchers said the systems were so tightly linked they could not rule out “tipping cascades”. If the Greenland ice sheet disintegrates, for instance, it could lead to an abrupt shift in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an important current that delivers most of the heat to the gulf stream. That, in turn, can intensify the El Niño southern oscillation, one of the most powerful weather patterns on the planet. The co-author Sina Loriani, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said tipping-point risks could be disastrous and should be taken very seriously, despite the remaining uncertainties. “Crossing these thresholds may trigger fundamental and sometimes abrupt changes that could irreversibly determine the fate of essential parts of our Earth system for the coming hundreds or thousands of years,” he said. In its latest review of climate change science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that tipping thresholds were unclear but the dangers would grow more likely as the planet heats up. It said: “Risks associated with large-scale singular events or tipping points, such as ice-sheet instability or ecosystem loss from tropical forests, transition to high risk between 1.5C to 2.5C and to very high risk between 2.5C to 4C.” The tipping point report also looked at what it called “positive tipping points”, such as the plummeting price of renewable energy and the growth in sales of electric vehicles. It found that such shifts do not happen by themselves but need to be enabled by stimulating innovation, shaping markets, regulating business, and educating and mobilising the public. A study from the report’s co-author Manjana Milkoreit last year warned against overusing the label of social tipping points by promising solutions that did not exist at scale or could not be controlled. “While scholarship benefits from hope, we need to exercise caution when offering social tipping points as potential solutions to the temporal squeeze of climate change,” she wrote.

Trade served the world economy very well in 2022. Despite a global pandemic that has caused nearly 7 million deaths (over 1 million of them in the United States), trade bounced back and supplied needed vaccines, medical supplies, and equipment around the world–while supporting an economic recovery that was much stronger and faster than projected.

Global supply chains proved remarkably resilient. In June, the World Trade Organization (WTO) had a reasonably successful Ministerial Conference attended by trade ministers from most of the world’s trading nations. They made good progress on reining in fisheries subsidies that were stripping the oceans bare of stocks of this important food source for the world’s peoples and undermining the livelihood of fishermen, particularly in very poor countries.

The World Trade Organization is in the news mostly for the wrong reasons nowadays. Many people regard it as an ineffective policeman of an outdated rulebook that is unsuited for the challenges of the twenty-first-century global economy. And WTO members generally agree that the organization urgently needs reforming in order to remain relevant. Recent months have brought further challenges. The WTO’s appellate body, which adjudicates trade disputes among member countries, effectively ceased functioning last December amid disagreements regarding the appointment of new judges to the panel. And in May 2020, Director-General Roberto Azevêdo announced that he would step down at the end of August, a year before his current term was due to end. Whoever Azevêdo’s successor is will face a major challenge. Since its establishment in 1995, the WTO has failed to conclude a single trade-negotiation round of global trade talks, thus missing an opportunity to deliver mutual benefits for its members. The Doha Development Round, which began in November 2001, was supposed to be concluded by January 2005. Fifteen years later, WTO members are still debating whether the Doha process should continue. Some think it has been overtaken by events, while others want to pursue further negotiations. The WTO has so far delivered disappointingly few other notable agreements as well, apart from the Trade Facilitation Agreement, which entered into force in February 2017, and the 2015 decision to eliminate all forms of agricultural export subsidies. Meanwhile, some of its members have worked together on a raft of much broader regional trade deals that cover pressing issues such as the digital economy, investment, competition, the environment, and climate change. The Doha Development Round, which was intended to modernize the WTO’s rulebook, covers very few of these topics. And even some of the organization’s existing rules can easily be circumvented, thereby upsetting the balance of rights and obligations among members. During the current COVID-19 crisis, for example, some countries have imposed questionable export controls on medical supplies and food products in order to mitigate shortages. But despite these challenges, the WTO has not been a “failure.” Rather, it has built upon the successes of its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which entered into force in 1948. The rules-based multilateral trading system that began with GATT has contributed immensely to global economic growth over the last seven decades, by reducing average tariffs and steadily eliminating non-tariff barriers. As a result, living standards have improved in most countries. Moreover, rules-based global trade has helped to underpin peace and security, because trading partners are more likely to resolve differences through negotiations than through armed conflict. Nonetheless, WTO members today recognize the need to reboot the organization for the 21st century. Developed countries believe that they have shouldered the burden of trade liberalization for far too long, and that developing countries should shoulder more obligations if they are in a position to do so. Least-developed and low-income developing countries, meanwhile, say that WTO rules are hampering their efforts to grow and modernize their economies. Over the last two decades, international trade has become a bogeyman for critics who blame it for the economic woes some countries face. But trade is not a zero-sum game: Rights and obligations can be balanced, as the evolution of global and regional trading rules since 1948 has shown. The question facing the WTO and its members now, therefore, is how to make progress and reach mutually beneficial agreements. All members should participate in this endeavor, because that is the only way the organization can regain its credibility and carry out its rule-making function. New negotiations must therefore take account of members’ varying levels of economic development, and aim—as ever—to reach fair and equitable agreements. Other crucial priorities for the WTO include enhanced transparency, in the form of timely notifications of countries’ trade measures, and an effective dispute-settlement system that commands the confidence of all members. A moribund WTO does not serve any country’s interest. An effective, rules-based international trade system is a public good, and failure to revive it will undermine governments’ efforts to pull the global economy out of the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The WTO has an irreplaceable role to play in transforming countries’ economic prospects and the lives of people around the world. Although the current crisis has brought the organization’s deteriorating health into sharp focus, its further decline is not inevitable. In a world economy already imperiled by COVID-19, we must now apply the antidote—members’ political will, determination, and flexibility—needed to revive it.

The WTO has noted that trade scepticism among policymakers and trade policy tensions over supply chains are manifesting themselves in even more fragmented and concentrated supply chains. This column develops a model to show how trade policy uncertainty deters the investment needed to facilitate integration into global value chains, and demonstrates how WTO agreements, by acting as a commitment device, lower this uncertainty and thus encourage investment and integration. Any erosion of the WTO’s credibility or destabilistion in the global trading environment can have long-term implications for global supply chains. US-China trade tensions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and national security concerns have exposed several risks in current global supply chains (Freeman and Baldwin 2022, Alfaro and Chor 2023). The response from governments and firms worldwide has focused on investments to make these supply chains more ‘resilient.’ 1 Another approach is directly targeting the policy shocks, for example by renewing cooperation in trade policy and mitigating systemic uncertainty about future policies. Cooperation via the WTO has, until recently, successfully reduced trade policy uncertainty (TPU), which has been an important source of export growth (Handley and Limão 2022). However, the credibility and enforcement of commitments in the WTO are currently diminished (see, for example, Wolff 2022 on dispute settlement). The WTO itself notes that trade scepticism among policymakers and trade policy tensions over supply chains are manifesting themselves in even more fragmented and concentrated supply chains (WTO 2023). Before abandoning hope of renewed cooperation in this area we must answer the following. What is the value of WTO commitments along the global supply chain? In a new paper (Handley et al. forthcoming), we start to address this question. Specifically, we model and estimate firm input sourcing decisions under TPU and use the framework to estimate the value of WTO commitments made by China upon accession. The reduction in TPU increased investments in new imported inputs within firms and made them more responsive to future trade liberalisation. This translated into higher final sales. These impacts from lower TPU – a more responsive demand for prices and diversified supplier portfolio – are in line with the rhetoric of policymakers and firms but undermined by the tensions in the WTO and in some regional agreements. TPU can be challenging to measure systematically over long periods. A useful descriptive tool is an index such as the one in Figure 1, constructed with the measure by Davis et al. (2019) of the frequency of Chinese language newspapers about TPU. We note a couple of features to provide context and illustrate the current importance of TPU. First, there is a reduction in this index after China’s WTO accession, which included its commitment to previous tariff reductions. Second, there is an increase in the 2008 crisis, which eventually subsided but at a higher level than before. The index rises again during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and spikes with his entry into office and successive threats and implementation of tariffs on Chinese intermediates and subsequent retaliation. Since 2021, TPU has subsided relative to those peaks but remains elevated. China started its process of trade liberalisation in 1992 with the introduction of the ‘Social Market Economy’ concept and the signing of the US-China memorandum of understanding on market access. Tariffs placed by China on intermediate goods quickly fell following these events. Figure 2 shows China’s average most favoured nation (MFN) rate declined from 35% in 1992 to around 12% in December 2001, when it entered the WTO, and was below 10% in 2006. The substantial liberalisation pre-WTO was not reflected in higher intermediate import shares relative to GDP, which fell between 1992 and 1998. This share did increase in a significant and sustained form after WTO entry, even though the tariff cuts were smaller in that period. One hypothesis for these facts is that Chinese importers believed the tariffs between 1992-1998 could be changed in the future without commitment through an agreement such as the WTO. The resulting tariff uncertainty lowered their investment in imported inputs. Under this hypothesis, the WTO accession lent credibility to the earlier liberalisation and thus spurred Chinese firm imports. We find that a significant fraction of the WTO impact on Chinese imports is due to this commitment mechanism, rather than the reduction of Chinese tariffs between 2000-2006, which many other studies emphasise.

On the twentieth anniversary of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2015, the outlook was sanguine as negotiators, trade practitioners and academics around the world reflected on the success of the Uruguay Round and the WTO’s achievements and contemplated its future at celebratory international conferences. Discussion tentatively turned to a possible future reform agenda but with little sense of urgency. Reform was seen more as potential embellishment rather than necessity. With the adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 and the Paris Agreement on climate change that same year, the world seemed to bask in a warm and inspiring glow of global solidarity. It seemed that the international community was recognizing that assuring our future prosperity depended not only on liberalizing trade but also on achieving environmental sustainability, social and economic equality, political stability and access to justice. But this cooperative spirit proved short-lived and long-simmering dissatisfactions with trade resurfaced, followed by convulsive reversals and a surprising return to protectionism. In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, and Donald Trump won the presidency of the United States on a campaign of “America first” in an election in which neither Republican nor Democratic party leaders supported free trade. Despite the evident and widely distributed gains from global trade,1 populism was fuelling political upheaval and bringing to the fore growing discontent about impacts of trade that had been festering for many years: the hollowing out and decay of once great industrial cities and the individual loss of well-paid and steady factory work. The US administration channelled the popular discontent into nationalist foreign policy, distrust of the rules-based international order, disregard of international ties and commitments, and resort to security exceptions, tariffs and trade wars. The global trading system has been battered by this approach, with growth slowing in 2019 to three percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. And while nations cooperated to resolve the 2008 financial crisis, that urge to work together to solve global issues has been subdued.2 Today, the WTO is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy — its Appellate Body (AB) effectively shut down by the United States blocking consensus on new appointments — and hegemonic trade wars seem to have replaced the steady pace of diplomacy and reasoned argumentation. The WTO finds itself struggling to respond effectively to the challenges of rapid economic, political, social, technological and environmental change, seemingly lacking the infrastructural resilience needed to weather today’s geopolitical storms. The global trading system, which only a few years ago was being lauded as the model of effective multilateralism, now seems locked in an out-of-date governance paradigm, in need of a new program of work with which to start to break impasses and address the urgent and encompassing challenges of the twenty-first century. Part of the WTO’s challenge is figuring out just how to start such a reform initiative when there are such strongly opposing factions to be drawn into consensus. This essay series grows from earlier work done by CIGI on the WTO: a consultation on the Canadian government’s Ottawa Group initiative on WTO reform3 and two essay series on reshaping trade through women’s economic empowerment4 and mainstreaming gender in trade agreements.5 Launched as the AB was about to become non-functioning in December 2019, this series casts its net more broadly than the dispute settlement issues while acknowledging that the WTO’s challenges are all deeply interconnected. The essays explore the potential for more comprehensive WTO reform to imagine a new program of work and a way to embark upon that work, and thereby to help invigorate discussions for the next Ministerial Council meeting. The growing trade tension has sparked important conversations at the WTO and in nations’ capitals about potential WTO reform. Both the European Union6 and Canada with the Ottawa Group7 (comprised of Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, the European Union, Japan, Kenya, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland, and notably not including China, India and the United States) have put forward ideas for WTO reform, as have others. Canada’s discussion paper focused on improving the monitoring of existing rules, safeguarding and strengthening the dispute settlement function, and modernizing trade rules for the twenty-first century. This series looks at the issue of reform and modernization from a variety of angles. While some contributors focus on how to keep the lights on in dark times, others offer ideas on how to restart productive negotiations, how to reform and restore the rules-based dispute settlement system (DSS), how to make trade more inclusive, whether to narrow the WTO’s focus to trade basics to leave more flexibility to nations for their own development, and how to update and reshape the WTO to deal with today’s interconnected global challenges.

Does the WTO work as an international regime? From a rationalist perspective, the answer is a qualified yes. A core function of the institution is transparency, and as such a good starting point in discussing its effectiveness as a regime is with a rationalist analysis of the extent to which it increases the efficiency of international cooperation. The WTO’s primary function, from an efficiency perspective, is to improve property rights in the issue-area of international trade. The rules of the international trading system, the core of the WTO, are in effect specifications of property rights, and the DSM is a mechanism for clarifying and adjudicating these rights. The specification of these property rights is not perfect, but it is clearly better than what had gone before (better in the sense of more efficient, not necessarily fairer). In this sense, the WTO, as a regime, has been remarkably successful (although the current politicization of the DSM undermines that conclusion somewhat). It has also had some success at decreasing transaction costs and at improving information flows, but this success has been more muted. Trade negotiations carried out under the WTO’s auspices retain high transaction costs, in that they can last decades and employ thousands of people, although this process is probably more efficient than holding a large number of bilateral trade negotiations. The WTO improves information flows by collecting and publishing trade statistics, although this often duplicates information available elsewhere.

From a reflectivist perspective the answer is also a qualified yes. As suggested earlier in the chapter, the WTO and its predecessor the GATT have been enormously successful at institutionalizing the idea of rule-governed trade as a fundamental and widely accepted norm of the international political economy. And the DSM has come to be accepted as the core adjudicative body in the realm of international trade. But there are threats to the WTO’s role as the legitimate core of the international trading system stemming from the failure of the Doha Round of negotiations and the broader deadlock in multilateral trade negotiations. The lack of progress has led many of the world’s major trading powers to focus on regional and bilateral trade agreements instead. At a certain point, the increasing diplomatic focus on regional and bilateral agreements will inevitably threaten to undermine the concept of global cooperation and of nondiscrimination that the WTO was designed to legitimate (e.g., Bhagwati 2008).

The decline of the WTO, a threat to global stability EDITORIAL Le Monde The World Trade Organization's key role in the coordination of world trade is being increasingly questioned. This is a dangerous slope, which risks leading to the primacy of the law of the strongest, at the worst possible time. Published on December 28, 2022, at 11:41 am (Paris) 2 min read The World Trade Organization (WTO) is facing an existential crisis. Since its creation in January 1995, the institution has accompanied an unprecedented expansion of international trade, by making trade more fluid through the lowering of customs barriers and the convergence of standards between countries. China's accession to the organization in 2001 dramatically accelerated this process of globalization, which promised greater economic prosperity and geopolitical stability for all. But in the space of a few years, the machine has seized up. The financial crisis of 2008, political mobilization against deindustrialization in developed countries, the rise of sovereignty, China's challenge to the hegemony of American power, and finally the weakening of supply chains caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have all questioned the virtues of globalization, threatening the WTO with obsolescence. In just a few years, the organization has become an administrative machine whose unwieldiness is matched only by its inability to build consensus among its 164 members. While negotiations stall, disputes proliferate, and customs and normative barriers are being erected everywhere. A few days ago, during the last WTO General Council, the director general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, could only deplore the organization's inability to find a new impetus. A system in bad shape

Turmoil surrounds the international trading system and especially the World Trade Organization (WTO). The 1999 WTO Ministerial Meeting in Seattle broke down in chaos. Other international gatherings to promote economic integration, including the European Union’s 2000 Summit Meeting in Gothenburg and the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, have triggered similar protests and violent clashes between demonstrators and the police. Undoubtedly, the anti-globalization backlash and the rioting in the streets has a number of causes (Blackhurst, 2001; Esty, 2000). And, while some commentators have dismissed the demonstrations as mere ‘noise’, I believe a ‘ signal’ can be extracted from the current difficulties of the trade regime. Simply put, the international trading system has not adapted to a rapidly changing global scene – and now faces a serious legitimacy crisis (Keohane and Nye, 2001). This article explores the origins and implications of this crisis. I argue that the WTO stands at a watershed. The post-World War II international order centered on issue-based ‘decomposable hierarchies’ has begun to break down (Simon, 1996; Keohane and Nye, 2001)." A new, more complex and fluid international system is beginning to emerge. But the new architecture has structural flaws. In particular, little attention has been paid to what is required to establish the legitimacy of international organizations in general and the WTO in particular (Bodansky, 1999; Hurd, 1999; Stephan, 1999). The WTO appears simultaneously to be at the leading edge of the economic integration process and yet curiously old-fashioned and out of step with some modern norms, particularly those involving good public decisionmaking. As recent events have demonstrated, coherently managing interdependence is of vital importance. This need makes the resolution of the legitimacy issues surrounding the WTO of even greater urgency. Many of those who criticize the WTO and other elements of international economic structure have little foundation for the charges they make. Indeed, many of the attacks on the WTO are off-base and deeply confused. The suggestion, for instance, that freer trade leads to greater poverty disregards the enormous gains that have been made by hundreds of millions of people across the planet over the last several decades in countries that have opened themselves up to world markets (Bhagwati, 1993; Anderson and Blackhurst, 1992). Those chanting ‘no WTO’ really do not want an international marketplace without structure or rules in which multinational corporations operate without constraints.

GENEVA — U.S. President Joe Biden declared back in February that "America is back," but it doesn't feel that way in Geneva. In the run-up to the World Trade Organization's most important gathering — the ministerial conference usually held every two years — there is wide dismay that Washington isn't leaping back into multilateral trade with gusto, but is still skeptical of re-engaging with an institution that it sees as failing to counter China's state-led economic model. The ministerial powwow for the WTO's 164 members will run from November 30 to December 3, but there is scant hope the lakeside meetings will rescue the moribund trade body from its cryogenic freeze. Few diplomatic fora were so looking forward to the end of the era of U.S. President Donald Trump, who lambasted the WTO for being soft on Beijing and brought the world's top trade court to a halt by vetoing the appointment of its judges. But Biden is bringing changes of style rather than substance. His administration is just as fixated with Beijing's massive state subsidies as Trump's was, and the WTO's supreme court is still rudderless because of Washington's veto. Admittedly, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai sounds more accommodating toward the organization than her predecessor Robert Lighthizer. "Let me begin by affirming the United States’ continued commitment to the WTO," she said during a trip to Geneva last month. "The Biden-Harris administration believes that trade — and the WTO — can be a force for good." That's more polite than Trump, who even threatened to pull Washington out of the WTO, but her words fell flat with diplomatic delegations in Geneva. "There were really high expectations with regards to what she was going to tell us about potentially more concrete re-engagement at the WTO," one Geneva-based trade diplomat said, describing a room full of ambassadors. "But that didn’t happen. It was a big disappointment." Pascal Lamy, the former director-general of the WTO and a former EU trade commissioner, echoed that sentiment. "I think what has happened since a year roughly — at least since [the U.S.] started talking a bit about trade — and what Katherine Tai has been doing, is all talk and no walk," he told POLITICO. "If you look at where they have moved, so far, zero concrete moves." In the run-up to the WTO's conference (dubbed MC12), the U.S. has few tangible proactive proposals to boast of, be it in trade and health or WTO reform. Tai told reporters last month that her Twitter announcement in May about Washington supporting an intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines was "an exercise of leadership." But the U.S. hasn’t presented any concrete text proposal over the past year and is remaining relatively neutral and cautious during meetings. What’s more, Washington is also trying to water down a political declaration on trade and health being prepared for the ministerial meeting. Washington sees red The cold war between the U.S. and China is at the heart of many of the problems behind the attempt to revive multilateralism. During last month’s WTO review of China’s trade policy, Washington lashed out against Beijing, insisting that the international trading system is failing to counter China’s unfair practices 20 years after it joined the trade body. "China has used the imprimatur of WTO membership to become the WTO’s largest trader, while doubling down on its state-led, non-market approach to trade, to the detriment of workers and businesses in the United States and other countries," said David Bisbee, chargé d’affaires at the U.S. mission to the WTO. Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics think tank in Washington, suggested multilateral legal frameworks were failing to keep pace. "There is a big concern that the current rules don’t cover the types of Chinese practices that cause the most problem." But Schott cautioned that America's strongarm tactics weren't an effective response either. "The United States using unilateral coercion was unable to get anywhere on the state support for public enterprises in China. The approach that the Trump and Biden administration has taken so far have gotten nowhere, let’s be honest about that," he added. Even the WTO's sustainability-focused talks to curb subsidies that lead to overfishing are now caught up in the broader U.S.-China struggle. In May, Washington proposed new wording for the fisheries negotiations to recognize the link between forced labor and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. The switch to an approach targeting "forced labor" is widely seen as an attack against China, which doesn't want these kinds of labor practices being wrapped into the trade debate, especially as Beijing tries to dismiss mounting evidence of repression and forced labor in the Xinjiang region. "The text that [the Americans] proposed is actually quite innocent, so to say, so nobody can really argue with the content," another Geneva-based diplomat said. “The problem is, of course, the systemic angle, and there, the Chinese are afraid” that this could set a precedent for other WTO talks. Diplomats and observers read the American move to call out forced labor in illegal fisheries more as tactics than substance. "If they really want something substantive on forced labor, it could only happen at the International Labour Organization. So the political intentions behind this proposal are clear," the first Geneva-based diplomat said. "Whereas we really need substance on vaccines and that the entire world is calling for it, the Americans are silent. But when it comes to forced labor … they mobilize." The choices the U.S. is making at the WTO — aggressive toward China and passive on key topics like health or reform — are dictated by domestic constraints. "Those who believe that a trade policy is an international policy get it wrong. A trade policy is a domestic policy," said former WTO chief Lamy. Although "America First" is no longer officially the U.S. mantra since Biden stepped in, “Buy American” and nationalist sentiments are still taking a toll on U.S. trade policy. "A lot of Americans feel that trade liberalization has been unfair," said Jean-Baptiste Velut, who researches American political economy at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. There’s "strong nationalist resentment in the U.S. that Biden can’t ignore," he added. The administration isn’t willing to burn its political capital in Congress on trade and WTO reform at a time when Biden is focused on countering China and on his landmark Build Back Better legislation. "The short-run constraints of domestic politics in the United States are affecting the actions that the United States is willing to take [at the WTO]," Schott said. Happy with the status quo Countries, business groups and experts are nervous about the lack of U.S. drive ahead of MC12. Tai remained non-committal in her Geneva speech, telling reporters: "What success will feel like for me is that the day after MC12 concludes, that I feel a hope and invigoration for continuing the work that we're doing at the WTO … If there are a couple of trophies and badges that we have from the work at MC12, all the better." The EU’s ambassador to the WTO, João Aguiar Machado, said last month that "so far, we have not seen engagement" on the dispute settlement court that the U.S. froze. "It may well be that the new administration is still considering what sort of reforms they want, [but] there have been no proposals made by the U.S., and there has been no discussion whatsoever since the system became paralyzed in December 2019." Clete Willems, a former White House trade official under the Trump administration who now works for law firm Akin Gump, said he thinks Washington is being proactive in the fisheries talks and discussions on intellectual property for vaccines, but does wish the U.S. would take more of a lead on the trade and health declaration and WTO reform. “It is in the U.S. interest to actually start making proposals" on reforming the institution, Willems said. Now, American business groups are also calling for "urgent U.S. leadership" ahead of MC12. "The feeling here in Geneva is that there’s an expectation of a more strategic positioning of the U.S. It’s obvious that what they’re sustaining now is the status quo, and the status quo suits them more than just fine — especially regarding their blockage of the Appellate Body, which allows them to have ample leeway on trade policy. It’s pretty clear that they aren’t ready to give up this impunity at the WTO," the first Geneva-based trade diplomat said. U.S. trade officials reject the premise that there's a lack of American leadership and drive at the WTO. "We are deeply engaged, and I can't think of a member that is more engaged than the United States is across the organization,” an official from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) said. Another USTR official added: “We have lots of proposals, and we are active in every single venue. So I'm not sure how anybody who is paying attention could say that we are not out in front and leading on issues.” On reforming the institution, the officials said that Washington is advancing carefully. "We need a serious conversation on reform, and not one that is jammed through in a month or two," the second USTR official said. "We are taking a much longer-term view. Ambassador Tai has repeatedly said the important thing is that we have a functioning WTO to return to in January to begin serious work.” They declined to say whether the U.S. will be in favor of committing to WTO reform in a ministerial declaration. "Certainly, whether that sentence [on reform] is used or not, we are committed to fixing this organization and making it relevant,” the first USTR official said.

The United States is challenging the very existence of the WTO. Three scenarios may be possible over the next several years.

1) The USA continues to attack the WTO, regardless of who is elected President in 2020. It is worth noting that President Obama started the process of weakening the WTO and that Senator Bernie Sanders and other prominent Democrats have been opposed to international trade agreements that they believe have harmed American workers.

What ails America is ultimately not to be found in Beijing, Moscow, Hanoi, Tokyo, or Brussels. It is located within the United States. Our real scourges are homegrown, such as the rate of young people’s suicide, the declining life expectancy, the divergence of wealth and power, and gun violence. We need to address these, and they will not be resolved by hectoring other countries and instructing them on what they should be doing. Even U.S. price pressures, which many economists try to link to China, obscure the domestic roots of our problems. That’s especially true for shelter and medical services. Locating the cause of America’s ailments abroad enables policy makers to evade our social questions.

The U.S. increasingly relies on threats of sanctions to ensure allies and adversaries think twice about moving against its perceived national interest of the day. But, just like an aircraft carrier allows extensive power projection, so does access to the U.S. dollar. Without the moral leadership of a robust, vibrant domestic body politic, America’s leadership has become over-reliant on the stick instead of the carrot.

As explained in Section 1.1, below, the domestic legal regimes of WTO Members must meet (or exceed) the minimum standards of treatment set forth in the TRIPS Agreement. Further, as explained in Section 1.2, the TRIPS Agreement incorporates by reference key provisions of certain other international treaties on IP and allows Members to enforce those provisions through the WTO dispute settlement mechanism. Section 1.3 details some of the important substantive guarantees created by the TRIPS Agreement.

Interaction between Domestic IP Laws and the TRIPS Agreement

Demands for WTO accountability to, or accommodation of, non-WTO obligations are also sometimes framed as concern over the prospect of norm conflicts due to the activities of multiple actors operating within the same policy space. The argument generally is that the WTO, with its capacity for strategic linkage bargains, has the constitutional capacity and, perhaps, mandate to internalize the negative trade-offs associated with the free trade regime by recognizing the legal obligations of states to, for example, protect the environment, promote fair labour standards, protect human rights or secure other human welfare goals. Thus, claims for norm accommodation in the WTO reflect, at least partially, a legal argument that the trade system must be constrained by the obligations arising from other international law regimes, and that the welfare objectives of free trade should cohere with the social goals that more directly animate other multilateral instruments. To minimize conflicts among disparate legal regimes, scholarly attention has been directed at the importance of managing the inter-dependency that develops when institutional allocations of responsibility overlap.7 Such overlaps could be the unavoidable result of the proliferation of specialized bureaucracies that autonomously expand their specific mandates in response to the complexity and transnational nature of global problems.8 At other times, however, shared institutional oversight of a subject matter has been the deliberate design of states, such as in the case of intellectual property (IP), which was incorporated into the trade regime through the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement).9 With specific regard to TRIPS, a more nuanced form of inter-dependency has emerged from the strategic behaviour of states seeking to exploit the non-hierarchical structure of the international community by proposing norms in alternative fora specifically to undermine, if not upend, TRIPS obligations.10 Regardless of the underlying basis, however, scholars and commentators have encouraged stronger institutional coordination among international organizations as one way to overcome institutional isolation and to facilitate effective fulfilment of related mandates.11 The emphasis on coordination characteristically presumes equality among the relevant international organizations In this article, I argue that the WTO, in a hierarchical division of labour with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO),12 should be promoted as the future locus of substantive international IP regulation, particularly with respect to the creation of IP norms affecting the regulation and supply of global public goods such as health, education, scientific data and the environment. I advance three principal arguments in support of this claim. First, linkage is an indelible fact of modern economic relations. WIPO is neither formally charged nor structurally designed to accomplish the kind of linkage bargains now associated with the WTO. Second, the WIPO-WTO Agreement,13 while not unambiguous, can reasonably be interpreted as creating a hierarchical relationship between the two Organizations. Third, while there are risks and problems associated with a move to the WTO, particularly the WTO’s casuistic methods, there are good reasons, mainly flowing from the economic interests of developing and least-developed countries (DCs and LDCs), to prefer a hierarchical approach to the current institutional structure of global IP regulation

Without American leadership, the WTO will persist but will be unable to accomplish much more toward freeing and thereby enhancing the flow of world trade multilaterally through modernization of its rules for the 21st century. And the world will be worse off because of it. That said, the “few successes” Ngozi highlights are worth noting. Formalization of new rules that will reduce domestic regulatory barriers to services trade (of great value to the U.S.) New rules to help the poorest members of the WTO advance economically. A commitment to cooperate on trade action to help end global plastic pollution. And not least, a hard-won extension for another two years of the moratorium on taxation of electronic commerce (though at the potential price of ending this vital moratorium in March 2026 if it is not further renewed then). Perhaps even more significant is a new “plurilateral” accord agreed by 125 members to eliminate red tape and other bureaucratic barriers to domestic and foreign direct investment which could save participating members up to $1 billion a year and boost Foreign Direct Investment. It shows the right way forward for an organization that can no longer afford to make decisions on new rules only when all 166 of its members agree. Only opposition of India and South Africa to anything other than fully multilateral agreements kept this new agreement from being incorporated into the WTO legal framework in Abu Dhabi, so that is the next task. Perhaps more leadership from the United States would have overcome India and South Africa’s myopic obstructionism in Abu Dhabi. Instead, the Biden administration stood on the sidelines — an unfortunate yet unsurprising turn, given years of frequently ignoring the WTO, increasingly flouting its rules, and disingenuously opposing the restoration of an appellate tribunal that would again help the institution enforce its rules on all WTO members (including the United States and China). The administration should reverse course. It should return the WTO to the center of its trade policy and work for the conclusion of more plurilateral agreements — such as the new one on investment facilitation — on crucial issues in the American interest such as services, industrial subsidies, digital trade, technical standards, intellectual property, energy and environmental sustainability, and more.

After he won office, President Joe Biden pitched his foreign policy agenda as a return to form: defending and strengthening the rules-based international order. But, since taking office, his administration has picked up where its predecessor left off — undermining one of the most important institutions in international trade law, the World Trade Organization (WTO). For over two decades, the WTO enabled States to take one another to court over violations of trade law. But, in 2017, the United States, under the Trump administration, unilaterally hamstrung the WTO’s binding dispute system by blocking appointments to its highest “court,” the Appellate Body. By December 2019, the body dropped below its three-person quorum, which effectively means it cannot hear appeals. Today, all seven Appellate Body seats are empty. Without an Appellate Body, States can abuse the WTO’s dispute system by appealing decisions “into the void,” leaving them in limbo and unenforceable. Despite the blockade threatening both domestic businesses and the stability of international trade, it enjoys bipartisan support. And, though initiated by the hyper-protectionist Trump administration, the attack on the WTO has continued, and arguably intensified, under the Biden administration despite promises to recommit to the organization and its goal of restoring dispute settlement this year. Just last month, the U.S. Trade Representative blocked a 73rd attempt at initiating the Appellate Body selection process – a proposal co-sponsored by 130 Members. While the Biden White House criticized the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric, it nonetheless maintains the same fundamental stance: Appellate Body overreach undermines the WTO’s fairness, intended function, and legitimacy and that, simply put, the United States loses disputes too often. The United States now insists that general reforms to the admittedly flawed WTO system generally must come before resuscitating its dispute system. Still, the prescribed cure is decidedly worse than the WTO’s disease. Some, not all, of the U.S.’s criticisms are shared by fellow WTO Members, but the blockade alienates allies like the United Kingdom and European Union countries. By betraying the international trading system for which it wrote the rulebook, the United States is letting its leadership role slip away for little to no reason. Last week, negotiations at the WTO’s 13th Ministerial Conference spilled into extensive overtime. The conference – which was scheduled to run from Feb. 26-29 in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates – faced deadlock, threatening the package of agreements on fisheries, e-commerce, and agriculture expected from the meeting and ultimately thwarted major reforms. Despite these roadblocks, talks hinted at long-awaited progress towards the acute and potentially existential crisis of dispute reform and a lifting of the Appellate Body blockade. The Biden administration approached the conference with a “pragmatic” plan – to use the conference to build momentum towards reform. However, reports of progress proved optimistic. While WTO Members had originally hoped for a reform deal by the conference, the United States ruled out agreement before the meeting even began. Ultimately, the ministerial only produced redundant commitment to continued negotiation and the oft-touted goal of restoring dispute settlement this year. Biden’s trade team is laudably engaging in multilateral cooperation on WTO progress and reform, but its persistent blockade and lofty prerequisite demands for reviving the dispute system are a detriment to free trade. If the United States. stays its course, its fear of losing its leadership position over rules-based international trade will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore, the Biden administration should cut its losses, abandon the blockade, and restore the Appellate Body as a first step to WTO reform and a badly-needed showing of good faith. The World Trade Organization The WTO represents 164 Member countries, which account for more than 98 percent of global trade. It serves as both a structured forum where Members negotiate new trade agreements and as an organization that governs disputes over and enforcement of a network of existing treaties. The original and most prominent, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was negotiated after World War II based on a U.S. proposal for an international organization that would negotiate and enforce trade law. The dispute settlement system – another U.S.-led project – was created alongside the WTO proper in the 1990s. Member States can submit disputes to panels of experts assembled by the Dispute Settlement Body, which consists of representatives from each Member country. These independent reviewers assess whether a Member government’s trade policies violate WTO obligations. Panels issue reports detailing their decisions. If a Member breaks a rule, they must bring their trade policies into compliance and compensate the winning party. If a Member fails to comply within a reasonable time, injured Members can institute countermeasures, like hiked tariffs, to induce compliance. Members who are unhappy with a panel’s outcome can appeal to the Appellate Body. Seven individuals are appointed by consensus of the Dispute Settlement Body and serve staggered four-year terms. Their decisions are final and binding – if, of course, the Appellate Body is properly up and running. The Appellate Body Blockade Despite its contributions to global trade, the WTO has its fair share of problems. Two months after implementing the blockade, the U.S. Trade Representative issued a “Report on the Appellate Body” explaining the WTO dispute system’s many perceived shortcomings. The United States is right to object to some of the WTO’s structural issues. For instance, soon after the dispute system launched, the Appellate Body, originally expected to handle infrequent, narrow reviews, was inundated with work. Naturally, this caused frequent violations of the “ninety-day rule,” which mandates a three month time limit for the Appellate Body to make decisions – one of the U.S.’s many gripes. Further, the Appellate Body frequently did overstep its black-letter authority by reconsidering facts on appeal when only authorized to review questions of law. The United States also criticizes institutional issues beyond dispute settlement, such as the WTO allowing Members to self-identify as “developing” States and avail themselves of preferential treatment – a practice that some Members with high-income, industrialized economies, like China, India, and Singapore, controversially use to their advantage. Some complaints, however, are far more subjective, such as the U.S.’s frequent objections to Appellate Body interpretations of a treaty provision distinct from whatever interpretation Washington deems “correct.” For instance, both the Trump and Biden administrations rejected WTO panels’ interpretations of the GATT’s “security exceptions” provisions, which permit Members to take any action they “consider[] necessary for the protection of [their] essential security interests.” The United States argues the WTO should never second-guess a Member State’s claims regarding national security, no matter how implausible or provably false. In 2022, the United States lost a dispute in which it claimed impermissibly high tariff rates on imported steel and aluminum were essential for national security reasons. The United States is almost entirely alone in this view, and the EU succinctly describes the U.S. position as advocating for “the end of a rules–based multilateral trading system.” And, although the WTO dispute mechanism consistently finds that the security exceptions are not “incantation that shields a challenged measure from all scrutiny,” the United States is relentless in its insistence otherwise and, as recently as January, cited the issue as one of the main reasons for refusing any and all attempts at restoring the Appellate Body as it was previously structured. Ultimately, these critiques built to a crescendo: the institution of the blockade in 2017. By thwarting the consensus required to appoint new Appellate Body members, the United States functionally exercises a unilateral veto over the Body’s existence. A Misguided Bipartisan Attack on International Trade The WTO is imperfect, but the United States has jumped to a drastic response with far-reaching effects. The blockade places the rules-based system of trade that Washington spent over seven decades building and nurturing in jeopardy. Worse, gutting the Appellate Body harms U.S. interests in international trade and hastens the fall from its leadership position in the global economy. WTO Members are capitalizing on the moment by appealing “into the void” as decisions wait for Appellate Body reviews that may never come, rendering them unenforceable. This American-made loophole allows countries like China to wriggle out of losing disputes. The United States. itself abuses the system it broke: after losing two disputes involving the security exceptions in December 2023, it appealed the decisions into the void, refusing to abide by their outcomes.

As early as 2016, Donald Trump had highlighted the limits of an institution that was out of breath. The criticism was not unfounded, but instead of working to overhaul the organization through new governance and a reform of its modus operandi, the United States preferred to adopt the worst possible policy by paralyz[ed] the WTO's dispute settlement body. The arrival of Joe Biden in the White House had raised hopes of giving new impetus to multilateralism. In vain. Since 2020, the American president has followed in his predecessor's footsteps by making the reindustrialization of the United States his priority. The gigantic green subsidy plan passed this summer, the Inflation Reduction Act, shamelessly flouts WTO rules. The protests of the European Union (EU), voiced in early December by Emmanuel Macron during a trip to Washington, have no chance of making the United States change its course. By encouraging Europeans to follow suit, they are only further undermining an already ailing system. These tensions with the EU come in addition to the rivalry between China and the United States. Two-thirds of the trade between the two countries does not respect WTO rules. When the world's two biggest powers break away from this framework, it is difficult to ask other countries to continue playing the game. Although the death certificate of the WTO has not yet been written, its centrality in the coordination of world trade is widely questioned. Security and geopolitical issues are now taking precedence over economic interdependence. This is a dangerous slope, which risks leading to the primacy of the law of the strongest, at the worst possible time. The slowdown in global growth, the widening inequalities between the South and the North and the agricultural and environmental challenges cannot be overcome if the logic of every-man-for-himself dominates. It is not just the fate of the WTO, it is the fate of global stability that is at stake.

The WTO is a ‘member-driven’ organization. It works through many WTO Committees and other bodies in which all its members participate, subject to their choice. Bolstering the regular work of WTO bodies is one avenue for revitalizing the organisation’s deliberative function. These entities provide venues for members to discuss policies relevant to the respective subject areas covered by existing agreements and how these are changing. They provide opportunities for policy dialogue and consideration of options to avoid or limit adverse trade effects of policies that are not, or only partially, covered by current WTO agreements and member commitments.

Self-reflection should include policy dialogue on emerging issues and areas of opportunity and more generally seek to (re-)establish a common understanding of whether and how WTO bodies can be more useful to the government departments in national capitals that deal with each of the issue areas they cover. One element of such a process is for WTO members to determine what information they need to engage productively with each other in different WTO bodies. Noncompliance with many of the notification requirements included in WTO agreements in a timely or comprehensive manner has become a source of contention. Rather than seeking to enforce compliance with all existing notification requirements, it would be more constructive for WTO Committees to ask themselves what information is needed to fulfil their mandate and most usefully help economic actors and citizens navigate and understand the trading system.

The United States is challenging the very existence of the WTO. Three scenarios may be possible over the next several years.

1) The USA continues to attack the WTO, regardless of who is elected President in 2020. It is worth noting that President Obama started the process of weakening the WTO and that Senator Bernie Sanders and other prominent Democrats have been opposed to international trade agreements that they believe have harmed American workers.