Tania Voon has posted a working paper entitled “Eliminating Trade Remedies from the WTO: Lessons from Regional Trade Agreements” on SSRN. Some key excerpts:
[This paper] explores RTAs as positive models to reduce or eliminate the use of trade remedies among WTO Members, providing a concrete case study of the potential for ‘multilateralizing regionalism’.
Reducing reliance on trade remedies would diminish market distortions and enable fairer competition among producers across the world, bringing the WTO closer to its theoretical foundations (encouraging Members to specialise in areas in which they have a comparative advantage) and hence closer to its broader welfare objectives.
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It is true that a wide range of developed and developing countries (well beyond the group of traditional users) are now heavily reliant on trade remedies, rendering impossible wholesale reform in the near future. However, this should not prevent thoughtful, steady progress towards the longer-term goal of reducing the use of trade remedies among WTO Members, in order to begin to bridge the gap between economic rationality and political reality regarding trade remedies in the WTO. It may well be too soon to propose the wholesale elimination of anti-dumping measures or any other form of trade remedy in the WTO, but I do not believe it is too late.
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The paper concludes that a small number of RTAs do provide realistic models for ultimately reducing or eliminating trade remedies across the WTO Membership. Eventually, WTO Members could instead respond to predatory dumping with competition laws, to illegal subsidies with WTO dispute settlement, and to import surges with safeguards pursuant to a reformed safeguard regime. In the shorter term, WTO provisions do not prevent RTA partners from eliminating trade remedies amongst themselves.
The RTAs she refers to in the last paragraph are those which "substantively modify the WTO rules on trade remedies by restricting or eliminating their use in particular circumstances.” She finds 32 of these.
