The Transformation of International Trade Governance

Our era experiences a deep transformation of the global trading system. On the one hand, the fate of the Doha Round of trade negotiations under the WTO remains uncertain, if not bleak. In the past years trade talks collapsed at multiple occasions and since summer 2008 no tangible progress has been made. On the other hand, during the past 20 years, preferential trade agreements (henceforth, PTAs) that liberalize commerce between members have proliferated dramatically. We also can observe that many PTAs are no longer exclusively an instrument of trade policy, but more generally are a tool to manage globalization and to redistribute the benefits and the costs of economic cooperation. For instance, the US and the EU have been important drivers of conditional agreements. They open their domestic markets for goods from developing countries (allowing for traditional gains from trade), in return for developing countries’ liberalization of services markets, the acceptance of investment provisions, more stringent intellectual property rights and cooperation in non-economic areas. In sum, the critical importance of multilateral negotiations in the global trading system has been receding, whereas bilateralism is rocketing the sky. This workshop explores the consequences for international relations and domestic politics of this profound transformation of the global trade governance. This workshop invites theoretical and empirical contributions that address this new surge in going preferential in regulating trade and the multilateral-bilateral nexus. In particular, we encourage contributions both inspired by the international political economy (IPE) literature as well as the international institutions/cooperation literature (e.g., legalization, rational design, diffusion). Special attention is devoted to the conditions that affect the design, focusing on depth, scope, flexibility or rigidity of international trade institutions. From a dynamic perspective, we are interested in the interplay between various trade institutions (the WTO, multilateral-bilateral, across PTAs) and shifting priorities over time. And finally, we welcome contributions that assist in better grasping the effects of trade institutions in economic or political terms. We invite papers from different research traditions and research methods (qualitative and quantitative) to address some of above questions related to new regionalism via the use of trade institutions.