At a symposium today hosted by the Yeutter Institute, Andrea Durkin (Assistant U.S. Trade Representative, WTO and Multilateral Affairs) said the following about U.S. views and efforts on WTO reform (I don't have any comments on what she said, just thought people might be interested):
So how do we plan to go about reform, in a practical sense. I want to be cautious in how I describe and label outcomes that we would, we would say are reform outcomes, because we're not looking for a package for ministers to bless per se. Our approach is actually to reform by doing, to reform with intention as we go along. That said, we are thinking about approaches to improve each of the core functions of the WTO. That is monitoring and implementation of agreements, negotiations, and the enforcement of rights and obligations. So let me take each of those briefly in turn.
On the monitoring side, this is the day to day work of the WTO. And here, we and other members are conducting reviews for how to make improvements in each of the standing committees, whether it's renovating agendas to make room for more practical technical work, or changing the committee structure themselves. These are standing bodies and committees that are an underperforming but vital asset of the WTO. It is the day to day work. Some committees like those handling notifications of technical regulations are functioning pretty well. They're processing more notifications, more member comments than ever before. They have newly implemented an e-ping online system. I don't know if you've heard about the e-ping system. But it is a way of, when governments notify new regulatory measures -- typically in the past, they would only notify other governments and then we would notify stakeholders -- now through this e-ping system, you as stakeholders in the system can receive those notifications directly. And that has improved transparency a thousandfold by pushing information about draft regulations directly to you as the users of the system. However, in other committees, such as on industrial subsidies and state trading enterprises, notifications are at an all time low. You can say in general that agreements have failed to restrain China's use of subsidies due to its substantive limitations in the agreements. But China's failure to observe the most basic WTO transparency obligations inhibit further discussions that are necessary to further close those gaps in the rules. And China is not the only large economy that's failing to offer Members transparency about their measures. So we have to restore these norms of behavior if we're to build a foundation for new agreements and their implementation.
So that brings me then to the negotiation function. With respect to the negotiation function, we are increasingly confronted with new trade practices, new technologies that are not covered by existing WTO rules. Ecommerce is a good example of that. WTO members also struggle to address unfair trade practices by non market economies. And just as with reforming the committees, there isn't going to be one single solution to solve these problems. We need more flexibility in our approach to crafting new disciplines. In particular, there are a number of what we call Joint Statement initiatives, or JSIs, that were launched in 2017 that are pointing us in the direction of more flexible negotiation approaches. Give you some examples. Last December, 67 WTO members, accounting for over 90% of global services trade, reached an agreement setting out common parameters for services related domestic regulation. I know that sounds very, very humdrum, it's regulation, but it does set out a set of commitments that are calculated to save businesses on a day to day basis as much as 150 billion every year in reduced trade costs. That's an important development. Another important JSI covers e-commerce. 87 members of the WTO are now part of this negotiation on e-commerce provisions have been largely completed actually in the area of e-signatures, that means you can sign legal electronic documents. E-authentication, to present protect the identity of users in e-commerce transactions. It covers consumer protections, open government data, spam and other areas. It also covers paperless trading and digitization of customs procedures and that is a major new frontier, a really important development in global trade.
These two topics alone speak to an important principle for this administration. Ambassador Tai has consistently espoused making trade policy worker-centric. And in the WTO context, this means making good on our commitment in the preamble of the Marrakech agreement that established the WTO to raise living standards and ensure full employment. The JSI on services will unlock new opportunities in the services sector where job growth is strong. The e-commerce JSI will promote the diffusion of digital technologies which can enable broader participation in global value chains by reducing cost and information asymmetries and can lower compliance costs, particularly for small and medium enterprises. And just as the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement that entered into force in 2017 offered innovations as it introduced the idea of multispeed implementation, these JSIs offer another path for negotiating new agreements. The JSIs are essentially what we call plurilaterals. They don't involve all WTO Members. And that's by Members choice, but they are nonetheless an avenue for rebuilding trust by enabling agreements among interested WTO Members. And as I've said, they're a means for pursuing results that are broadly relevant to a wide range of stakeholders even in those members that are not part of those JSIs.
JSIs are not the only way forward but by pursuing more approaches, and more flexible approaches, we can reform the way we work to tackle forward looking trade challenges.Agriculture is another area where we need a fresh start to the negotiations. We have to let go of what has not worked in the past. And that is a tall order as I listened to delegations in Geneva, clinging to old positions. And in this new negotiating environment, it has to be said that large economies can no longer be given a pass from new commitments using self proclaimed development status, which allows them to essentially circumvent responsibility, even in sectors where that member might have a globally dominant market share.
So I'll come back to what I hinted at earlier. There are important decisions that were taken at MC12 that I think preview approaches ahead that can be successful. For example, some of the decisions, at least two of them taken an MC12, feature to an opt out by members such as China. What do I mean by that? What I mean is you have an opportunity in the context of an agreement itself to forge a commitment on which Members take on which obligations. There are no blanket exemptions except maybe for least developed economies, meaning China opted out of an exemption. So that is an important development. It's a preview of ways that we can move ahead in the negotiations. In the past the dynamic was to paint with too broad a brush equating the market power of a China with the market power of a Cameroon.
Let me touch on the last piece of the WTO's core functioning, which is dispute settlement. There's been a lot of attention given to the dispute settlement function of the WTO. As you know, there have been long standing, bipartisan concerns with the way that the dispute settlement function has functioned. And in some cases, decisions by the Appellate Body have harmed the ability of the United States and other market economies to respond to non market distortions that directly harm US workers and businesses. A central feature of reform will be to revitalize the agency of WTO members themselves in pursuing and securing acceptable resolutions and ensuring that the WTO dispute settlement system does not impose new obligations or take away existing rights in a way that was not agreed to directly by the Members.
To advance discussions on dispute settlement reform, the United States throughout this entire year has convened discussions in Geneva to seek out common ground on how we do reform for dispute settlement. The process has enabled us to hear from Members who have not felt heard on this topic in the past, and the discussions have elicited several themes pertinent to reform, such as accessibility of the system by developing country members. And so the discussions will continue in Geneva around those themes. So we're moving ahead.
