WTO boosts competitiveness -- trade regulations increase confidence

The good stuff So here’s my attempt to get myself excommunicated from the Order of WTO Sceptics, possibly even spark a full-on Inquisition. There are two categories of solid pro-WTO argument I’ll look at. One: it doesn’t look like much but you’d miss it if it went. Two: it does a vital thing (decreasingly well, but it still does it). On the first: WTO types say a lot of its really valuable work is stuff the outside world never really sees — one country identifying a potential problem in another’s trade policy, bringing it up in committee and defusing it through negotiation before it gets to litigation or a big diplomatic row. The foremost proponent of this view is former WTO staffer Peter Ungphakorn. His case is here: he reckons that only 2 per cent of new trade measures are flagged as problematic and only 0.07 per cent end up in formal dispute settlement. He probably has a point. Most disputes would probably anyway have been cleared up without actual exchanges of artillery, but it very likely reduces the friction involved. Also on the first: the WTO might well affect(s) trade even if it’s not immediately apparent. This recent paper looks at trade policy uncertainty, taking as its example China’s supply chains before and after joining the WTO in 2001 and particularly its companies enhancing their competitiveness by importing more intermediate inputs. China cut tariffs during the 1990s before joining, but there appears to be an extra effect from the actual impact of accession, presumably through reducing the probability of the tariffs being raised in the future. So limited though the rules might seem, they do appear to give companies some confidence in trading.