Government procurement – Trade β Blog

Comment: on India’s claim that a plurilateral WTO deal is ‘illegal’

Participants want to add their investment facilitation agreement to WTO rules, but India objects, calling it ‘illegal’, ‘non-mandated’, ‘non-multilateral’ and a ‘violation of the WTO framework’

SEE ALSO
In General Council India alone opposes investment deal as a WTO agreement
Technical note: types of plurilateral deals and adding them to WTO rules
What the agreement includes
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General Council minutes from this meeting and in general (published a few months after the meeting)
All articles tagged “investment facilitation”
All articles tagged “Plurilaterals”

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED JANUARY 12, 2024 | UPDATED MAY 10, 2024

India has circulated a strongly-worded statement prepared for the World Trade Organization’s General Council on December 15, 2023 on why it opposes bringing the new plurilateral agreement on Investment Facilitation for Development (IFD) into the package of WTO rules.

It describes the whole process as “illegal”, without any mandate and against the multilateral WTO framework. Worse, India says, the investment facilitation talks defy a “negative mandate” because of previous consensus decisions against the move.

Why is this important? Two words: WTO reform.

But is that legalistic rejection valid? Some lawyers suggest the argument is political even though it is dressed up as legal.

And “BS” is how one described the claim that negotiations can only be launched in the WTO by a consensus mandate.

Milestone or inchpebble? The first UK ‘trade deal’ with a US state, Indiana

It’s a non-binding memorandum of understanding and Indiana itself could hardly be less interested

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED MAY 29, 2022 | UPDATED MAY 31, 2022

“They said a US trade deal couldn’t be done. It can. We are doing it.”

That declaration by UK Minister of State for Trade Policy Penny Mordaunt is the headline on a piece she wrote on a partisan website to celebrate signing an agreement with the US state, Indiana.

But is it a “US trade deal”?

It is not with the “US”, but Indiana — a state with 2% of the US population (at 6 million slightly more than Yorkshire or Scotland), less than 2% of the US economy (GDP), and less than 1% of its area (ranked 38th of the 50 US states)
The actual “trade” content is minimal, when compared with what governments usually sign in trade agreements
“Deal” is misleading since this is not the conclusion of anything. It’s a memorandum of understanding (MoU) — or joint statement of intent — on future cooperation and on what future talks will cover. The way it’s presented stretches the meaning of “agreement” a lot.

The phrase “trade deal” is itself a problem.

Explainer: The 18 WTO plurilaterals and ‘joint-statement initiatives’

Brand new, decades old, or in between? Exclusive or applying to all members? Proper negotiations or just talk? Which is which, and what are the subjects?

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED JANUARY 3, 2022 | UPDATED APRIL 13, 2024

As World Trade Organization (WTO) members struggle to reach consensus on numerous issues, many see talks among “the willing” as the way to modernise the organisation and in many cases to update its trade rules. But the approach is controversial.

These talks and resulting decisions among only some WTO members are called “plurilateral” to distinguish them from “multilateral” activities and agreements among the WTO’s whole membership.

Text of the UK-South Korea free trade agreement

The longest sections are the schedule of commitments on goods (912 pages) and rules of origin (128 pages)

Posted by Peter Ungphakorn
SEPTEMBER 3, 2019 | UPDATED SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

These are links to the text of the UK-South Korea free trade agreement, signed in London on August 22 and published on the South Korean Government website. It has been posted on that site in separate parts.

The longest sections are the schedule of commitments on goods (912 pages) and rules of origin (128 pages).

(A few days later, the texts were published on the British government website on September 10, along with an explanatory memorandum. A report to Parliament was published separately the previous day.

(See also an earlier piece on rolling over the EU-S.Korea free trade agreement. This deal does that, but the devil is in the detail.)

What have the UK and Switzerland agreed on trade post-Brexit?

Some interesting insights are in Swiss government information notes, prepared mainly for traders and producers

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED FEBRUARY 5, 2019 | UPDATED JANUARY 27, 2021

A summary of this is on the EU Relations Law blog, here

What have the UK and Switzerland agreed on their trade relationship post-Brexit? Essentially, they have been partly “rolling over” to the UK the present Swiss-EU trade relationship.

EU agreements are being “rolled over” into UK agreements in order to allow as much continuity as possible for trade and for business. They are called “continuity agreements”.

Below are an introduction to the provisions on goods and services, followed by Swiss government summaries of key parts of its agreements with the UK, mainly on goods but also narrowly on services.

But first, some context and explanations.

What’s really happening on tariff quotas and Britain’s WTO commitments?

Just as tariff quotas are complex and misunderstood, the same applies to the news that pops up from time to time of what’s happening to the UK’s quotas in its post-Brexit WTO commitments

This replaces a 2017 article on tariff quotas, originally the second part of a pair of primers on the UK, its WTO membership, and its WTO schedules of commitments. The first part on the UK’s WTO membership is here. The original second part is archived here. See also: Beginner’s guide.

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED SEPTEMBER 12, 2018 | UPDATED JUNE 28, 2023

From autumn 2017, news appeared every few months about the UK’s proposed World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments and the objections of other countries. Some claimed this was a failure of London’s Brexit policy.

Headlines spoke of plans “in tatters” or “hitting the buffers”, “protests” by other countries, and even a Kremlin plot. They were wrong, at least for the time being.

Britain left the EU on January 31, 2020. It left the EU’s common commercial policy (particularly the customs union) when the Brexit transition ended on December 31, 2020. In practice, it is now operating under its controversial proposed commitments in the WTO on tariffs, tariff quotas, farm subsidies and access to its services markets.

So the headlines in the public media have gone quiet, and will stay quiet unless other WTO members kick up a fuss. Inside the WTO, those members continue to raise objections in the WTO such as the November 2020 meeting of the Market Access Committee. But it is too soon to tell whether they will take any legal action.

Meanwhile countries had been negotiating quietly and in early 2021 information emerged of agreements between some of them and the post-Brexit EU27, particularly on tariff quotas. The UK stayed quiet but EU sources are quoted saying the UK was part of the talks.

UK, EU, WTO, Brexit primer — 1. WTO membership

Let’s keep this simple. What lies behind the sudden surge in interest in the UK’s and EU’s relationship with the World Trade Organization? First: the UK’s WTO membership

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED OCTOBER 7, 2017 | UPDATED OCTOBER 10, 2017

Adam Sharpe is my editor at IEG Policy. On October 5, he emailed me. “I almost spat my coffee out,” Adam wrote, “when I turned on twitter and saw that ‘EU-UK WTO’ was trending this morning. Looks like TRQs are now ‘mainstream’.”

“EU-UK WTO” was trending because suddenly the media were reporting on some highly technical discussions related to the UK leaving the EU (Brexit) and the implications in the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Why UK is already under WTO rules, and why that matters for Brexit

If we want to understand the UK’s trade relations with the EU after Brexit we cannot say that without a UK-EU deal they will “fall back on WTO rules”

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED FEBRUARY 8, 2017 | UPDATED FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Now that the UK is about to start negotiating its departure from the European Union, it’s important to understand the meaning of World Trade Organization (WTO) “rules”.

Why? Because people are talking about WTO rules as if they only kick in if the UK and EU fail to reach agreement on their future trade relationship — that only then would the UK and EU “fall back on WTO rules”. They are wrong.