Trade Policy Regimes and Development Strategies: A Comparative Study

2003

There is no doubt that the European Union (EU) has made a positive contribution to trade liberalisation and development in recent years. In fact, the WTO Secretariat Trade Policy Review (WTO TPR) pointed out that the EU played a leadership role prior to and during the Doha negotiations, and contributed significantly to the successful launching of the Doha Development Agenda. The EU – and the European NGO community in particular – have been responsible for the significant breakthrough made with the acceptance of the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health at Doha. The Everything-But-Arms Initiative has no doubt led the way in addressing the market access needs of Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Further, it should be acknowledged that the EU Commission played a leadership role in beginning the serious debate among Member States on the need for the radical reform and adjustment of its agricultural and trade policies by the introduction of the Mid-Term Review of the Commo...

2003

The World Economy, 1996

The thesis analyses how European trade policy can best be designed to make it a strong and consistent instrument in the EU’s overall policies towards developing countries and how it can enable those countries to follow the paths of the EU towards growth, peace and regional integration. This question is of particular interest when bearing in mind that the EU as a multilevel-system faces additional challenges in making its development and trade policies coherent and consistent. Therefore the thesis addresses questions such as the (obstacles to) cooperation between the EU and its Member States, the coordination of trade and development policies and the EU’s capability of working together with the developing countries in identifying and meeting their needs.

2019

Trade has become a much higher profile policy area for the European Union following the decision by the Trump Administration to pursue a more protectionist trade policy and US questioning of multilateral cooperation and the WTO, and the rising concern in the EU regarding the competitive implications of China's industrial policies. Designing appropriate responses to trade tensions will be one of the challenges confronting the new Commission. Responding to protectionism abroad with protectionism at home is not the answer; maintaining an open policy stance is important for economic growth prospects. As the world's largest trading power, the EU should ramp up efforts to revitalize the WTO and deepen trade cooperation with like-minded countries to discipline the use of globally welfarereducing trade and investment policies. Further improving transparency and monitoring the implementation of trade policy is needed to address legitimacy concerns and ensure the political sustainability of the EU's trade strategy.

2016

World-wide international economic policies during the last few decades have shown a rising interest in regional integration in various new forms. Not only has the number of regional integration arrangements expanded, but, even more strikingly, their scope and depth have advanced in a spectacular manner. The analysis of such experiences would be very important for the development of further integration initiatives in the framework of the CU/SES/EAEU as well as for the design of efficient and sustainable integration policies in the Eurasian Economic Union. The questions of creating common and coordinated policies beyond trade will be the most important for the first years in EAEU. Apart from the complex regulatory and governance issues in alternative integration arrangements, other challenges facing the integration on the wider European and Eurasian economic space relate to geopolitical, economic and sectoral heterogeneities in the region. Assuming that the current frictions between R...

Ssrn Electronic Journal, 1996

IR 473 - European Union in World Affairs, METU, 2017

IR 473 - European Union in World Affairs, METU - 2017 Trade, cooperation agreements, association agreements, enlargement policies, development cooperations, sanctions and humanitarian aids are the tools to shape the foreign policy of the European Union. They are also known as external actions in the foreign policy dimension. The European Union uses these tools to reach the foreign policy goals and to have better relations in international agenda.

2000

EU trade policies and the environment in which they are determined are now considerably different from when the EU came into being in the 1950s. With the exceptions of agriculture and textiles and clothing, tariffs and quantitative restrictions on trade in goods have been reduced to historically very low levels. But trade policy is now about much more than border restrictions upon trade in goods. Trade in services and the impact of national differences in regulatory regimes are now firmly on the trade policy agenda. This paper describes the current multilateral and preferential trade policies of the EU. It highlights the increasing importance of regulatory issues and the fact that some of these are being addressed outside of both multilateral and standard bilateral free trade agreements. This reflects the mixed motives behind EU trade policies and that for trade with certain regions the typical political economy factors framing trade policy are no longer relevant. For example, liberalisation of transatlantic trade, in the limited form at present of mutual recognition of conformity assessment, is being strongly driven by large corporate business. This trend suggests that the pyramid of preferences usually used to depict EU trade policies is becoming very distorted.

EUROPEAN RESEARCH STUDIES JOURNAL

Purpose: The aim of the paper is to present an original concept of measuring the degree of protectionism (DP) by constructing a synthetic measure of DP on the basis of the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Owing to application of TOPSIS method, another goal was achieved in ranking and classifying EU member states in terms of degree of protectionism. Design/Methodology/Approach: In the study of TOPSIS method, which is a multi-criteria decision-making method that allowed to measure the degree of protectionism, EU member states were investigated. Findings: The results reveal that EU countries were not strongly diversified as regards to DP level (with some exception of Germany and The Netherlands). Furthermore, no EU member states can be qualified as purely liberal nor fully protectionist. The results of the study referring to top protectionist countries reveal some similarities to the results of other classifications based on different methodology. Practical implications: The outcomes of the study might be used by decision-makers in terms of commercial policy, both at the EU institutional level as well as outside this framework-by EU trade partners. Ranking might also serve as an instrument for boosting commercial policy and practices promoting further trade liberalization. Originality/Value: Although there are plenty of papers on protectionism, so far there is no universally accepted method of measuring the phenomenon. Furthermore, the majority of studies focus on tariffs only or selected trade instruments, what brings the risk of underestimation of degree of protectionism, as countries use plenty of different measures in this respect. Thus, in our paper a new approach was proposed. The application of TOPSIS method with data extracted from Global Trade Alert that provides comprehensive list of all diverse trade policy interventions. The paper contains an original authors' concept of measuring DP, which might be also applied to comparisons of EU member states with other countries, thus the paper will contribute to the development of literature.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

This book is an analysis of the European Union (EU) as a case study in a new plurilateral trade order. This book is a contribution to the EU’s external trade relations, which is a sub-field of the broader field of the EU international relations law. This book is not about EU trade law as seen from the outside, nor is it a study of international trade law; rather, it is an introspective analysis of EU trade law and policy. In conducting this research, I have identified the EU external trade relations as the main field of study, and international trade law as a background field, with a specific interest in services trade in the Doha Round.

2016

The paper presents the main issues discussed at the international conference “EU Trade Policy at the Crossroads: between Economic Liberalism and Democratic Challenges” which was held on 4-6 February 2016 at the C3-Centre for International Development in Vienna, Austria. The conference aimed at contributing to the trade policy debate by promoting a trans- and interdisciplinary analysis of the current trade regime and policies in the EU and its likely economic, social and political impacts. Contributions from a variety of academic disciplines, such as e.g. economics, political science, law and sociology were presented. Similarly, the conference was open to a variety of theoretical and normative positions in the social sciences. In addition, the conference managed to bring together researchers from academic as well as other research organizations with policy-makers and political activists from political organizations, NGOs and social movements.

Srpska politička misao

As one of the most important global trade actors, in the period that lasted from 1999 to 2021the European Union promoted five different trade strategies. Some of them, such as the strategy of “managed globalisation” (of 1999) and “Global Europe” (of 2006) represented a deviation from the previous trade practice, while others (“Trade, Growth and World Affairs” from 2010, “Trade, Growth and Development” of 2012, and “Trade for All” of 2015), for the most part, included significant improvements compared to previous strategic documents. The latest communication document of the European Commission, “Open, Sustainable and Assertive Trade Policy” (of 2021), points to the Union’s adaptation to new circumstances, emphasising the concept of open strategic autonomy and proclaiming a return to multilateralism based on fair and sustainable rules. Although the EU seeks to present itself as a leading initiator of change in the existing static trading system, this paper will attemptto prove that,in...

The Europeanization of Turkish Public Policies, 2015

2011

Following the onset of the financial crisis in September 2008 and the subsequent “Great Trade Collapse” (Baldwin 2009), many countries actively used trade policy instruments as part of their response to the global recession. Governments pursued a mix of trade liberalization, trade promotion, and trade restrictions. The choice of trade policy has varied, with limited use of tariff hikes or antidumping and safeguard actions. Sector-specific support to industries dominated initial responses to the crisis, and there has been increasing resort to nontariff measures. Recent research suggests that vertical specialization—the growth in global supply chains—has played a significant role in limiting the use of traditional protectionist instruments. Pressures on governments to support domestic economic activity may increase, given current gloomy economic prospects and more binding macroeconomic policy constraints, and the number of protectionist measures has recently risen. Open trade cannot b...