Countries in the SPS Barrier database

Posted by pwg on Tuesday, May 16, 2006

There are about 8,000 records in the database: about 4,000 containing SPS (‘health’)barrrier notifications and a similar number containing TBT (‘technical’)barrier notifications. Ninety countries notified SPS barriers between 1999 and the third quarter of 2005. Over the fold, there’s a list of these countries, with links into the country-records in the database…

If you are logged-in (and registered … it’s free) you will find a list of countries below. Click on a name to see a new window with the first of the record for that country from the SPS database. Use the ‘List’ tab to see all of the records at once in a ‘spreadsheet’ format.1


Albania




fn1. Strictly speaking the WTO members notifiying the barriers are not all ‘countries’: Hong Kong and Taiwan are not considered ‘countries’ although they are full WTO members.

Tags for this entry: wto  resources  database  quarantine  sps  notifications 

A database of standards barriers

Posted by pwg on Sunday, May 07, 2006

Over and over again, if you talk to business people who trade, you find that these barriers rank much higher on the scale of their concerns than tariffs or quotas, for example.

The WTO has tens of thousands of documents from its Member governments reporting the use of these barriers and explaining when and how they apply. But the ‘notifications’ to the Committees on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Committee on Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary Measures that contain all this information are difficult to find on the WTO website and almost impossible to search through.

What importers and exporters need is a database of these measures that can be consulted easily and quickly. That’s what Inquit has now created: a database of the barriers notified to WTO since January 2000.

There are, in fact, expensive subscription databases of national standards. But WTO alone holds a record of all the ‘legal’ measures that Member governments are required to notify under threat of sanction by other governments. What I’ve done is to turn these records from ‘MS Word’ files into a searchable database .

As far as I know, this database is unique. There are others out there, but they offer only a narrow selection from the WTO data or only the data from the last year or so. Inquit’s database offers complete information from the WTO notifications for the past 5 years.

You can find an introduction to the database and free access to the reports here
I hope you find the database useful. Please tell me what you think. What could I do to improve it? What else would you like me to add to the reports?

Tags for this entry: wto  resources  database  quarantine  sps  notifications 

Google wool

Posted by pwg on Tuesday, December 27, 2005

A zeitgeist is a spirit of the times. Google can, probably, pretend to measure it, at least for a large proportion of people in Europe, the Americas and parts of Asia using the subject of queries to it’s databases as a proxy. But oddly, they choose only to pretend to tell us what it is. For an information utility, Google is very frugal with information.

Google claims

It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. (Google Press Center: Zeitgeist)

Well … maybe. In fact the data on individual searches tell us only about behaviors during the year: this isn’t so much zeitgeist as a snapshot of popular history. I would say that a zeitgeist is, among other things, the addiction to celebrity: Google says it’s the wedding of Charles Windsor and the other woman—which is at best an inadvertent synecdoche and at worst an intellectual fraud.

I don’t believe, of course, that there’s anything actually fraudulent in the Google report: the ‘zeitgeist’ site is an amusement, not a sociology paper. But the graphs that it offers for selected queries such as “London” (the bombings) or “Jen and Brad” (celebrity divorce) are, nevertheless, misleading because they are without scale. At most they tell us that there was a spike in some unknown magnitude of interest before and after the event they presumably illustrate. But without scale we can’t compare the relative interest in Angelina Jolie, Martha Stewart and Cardinal Ratzinger (for example). We don’t know if they figure more or less in the popular imagination nor whether Jolie’s adoption of a child is more fascinating than Ratzinger’s assumption of the Triple Crown.

That relativity comes much closer to figuring the zeitgeist than the relativity of interest in a particular phenomenon or person before and after their (latest) moment of fame or infamy.

But Google, for reasons we can only speculate about, choses to keep that more useful information to itself.

Tags for this entry: ideas  people  internet  google  angelina jolie  charles windsor  martha stewart 

Ten observations about the WTO’s first decade

Posted by pwg on Sunday, December 18, 2005

As of Saturday 16, there was little consensus inside the Hong Kong Conference Center as you can read from the press coverage, except that the European Community’s negotiating position is unacceptable to everyone else. The atmosphere is poisonous and the discussions, even in the smallest and most senior informal groups (the ‘green room’ meetings organized by Director General Lamy) are can best be described as ‘pissing matches’, according to my informants. I am attending a marginal meeting on the WTO legal system: notes for my talk (“Observations on the first decade of WTO”) are over the fold …

Ten observations: Some, possibly provocative, ideas that were not included in WTO: the First Ten Years . It’s the ‘market access’ agenda … for now

1. The WTO had a lot of weight in its saddlebags as soon as it jumped from the gate. It was weighed down with continuing negotiations on the most difficult parts of the GATS negotiations: on financial services, telecommunications and a proposal for a global zero tariff regime on high-tech products. Right from the outset many of the developing country members of new organization began to question the balance, relevance or even the purpose of the obligations in the agreements in the interminable debate on ‘implementation issues’ . The industrialized countries, were headed in the opposite direction, seeking to extend the reach of the treaties to cover competition policy and investment. Although the Members quickly dropped proposals for negotiations on environment and labour standards, by the time of the first WTO Ministerial Conference in Singapore (1996), the weight of the ‘high policy agenda’ of some industrialized countries was slowing progress; to a spectacular halt at Seattle and again at Cancun. By the end of 2003, it was finally clear that WTO had to ditch these ambitions and ‘stick to its knitting’; the ‘market access agenda’ as then-USTR Zoellick called it in a letter to trade ministers. The Doha round is now struggling, once more, with something like the ‘classic’ objectives of trade barriers and subsidies. There are prospects of only modest success and—taking account of the much greater progress on market access that is made unilaterally than by negotiation, and considering that private interests have other concerns, there is reason to doubt that the ‘market access’ agenda holds the rewards that it once did …

2. During the first six years, up to the Doha meeting, developing country representatives and many NGO commentators, pounded away both at ‘implementation’ questions and at the ‘single undertaking’, that they characterized as an unnecessary constraint that denied them the so-called ‘policy space’ needed to manage economic development. There was (is) some substance in their complaints about the balance of the Agreements. But the single undertaking did not warrant their criticism. The willingness of Members to grant extensions of time for implementation and to make deep concessions in the case of LDCs (recently, for example, eliminating some of their obligations in IP), showed that there was no hostility to flexible arrangements where there were demonstrated problems of implementation or interpretation. Also, the failure of many members to meet their notification obligations under the Agreements in the first few years suggests that implementation was less than punctual. With one or two exceptions (India – Pharmaceuticals), none of this had any consequences in the Dispute Settlement processes. What the maligned single undertaking does acheive, however, is uniformity that the biggest economies would otherwise escape (on steel, textiles, agricultural subsidies, safeguards) with impugnity not available to the smaller members of WTO. Without the single undertaking, the political economies of the USA, Europe, Japan, China, India and others could easily develop an irrisistible centrifugal momentum.

3. The ‘Development agenda’ is the worst sort of marketing spin: it plays to hopes so misplaced that the title seems almost cynical. Although adherence to WTO Agreements is the ‘gold standard’ of external commercial policy and although the Preamble to the Agreement on WTO mentions many broad economic goals consistent with development, there is no development agenda in WTO because the Agreements are designed to avoid conflicts of laws and regulations, not to promote development. They contain no recipes even for trade policy and no guidance on the complex role that trade plays in the growth and distribution of incomes that contributes to economic development. When the WTO trains developing country trade offiicals (as Alan Beattie notes in his recent FT story), they acknowledge that the most that they can offer is training on the management of the treaties; not on the management of trade policies. WTO officals may have views about the myriad choices that are required for economic policy, but the Agreements are agnostic about fundamental questions of economic strategy—such as whether autonomous or ‘outward oriented’ growth strategies are best—and deal ambigouously with many detailed questions of economic management (TRIPS is probably the biggest exception; but the choices it makes are not necessarily optimal for a developing economy). The World Bank and others (including WTO) in the Integrated Framework of assistance to LDCs have adopted the objective of ‘mainstreaming’ trade in national development strategies: but since the WTO has no mandate to deal with the private interests that produce, consume, trade and invest it is difficult to assign it a practical role in this endeavour. At best, WTO can train officials on the provisions its own agreements whose subject matter is the maintenance of global, not domestic, systems.

4. It is hard to see how the WTO could be more open and yet remain responsible for managing the trading system. There is no ‘tripartism’ in WTO as there is in the ILO or in ECOSOC: WTO is for soverigns (or, at least, sufficiently sovereign territories) able to treat with others on trade policies and laws. There would be no point in ‘opening’ Membership or even offering a role in decision-making to non-government bodies. Such an organization would not be any more capable of managing the world trading system—which is a creation of law—than the WTO as presently constituted. In all likelihood, it would be more open to rent-seeking influences; would be less representative because the representative character of the private membership would not be based on universal sufferage; and would carry less weight with governments, who have no reason to share power with non-sovereigns. The processes of WTO, such as the committee work, are not completely transparent because governments cannot—for practical reasons—negotiate in public; to do so would be to invite endless ‘back-door’ negotiations with lobby groups. But WTO’s work is much more transparent to business and civil society interests than its critics alledge. Any WTO delegation may, and almost every Ministerial delegation does, include non-official delegates representing national business and civil society organizations. This facility is maintained, too, in UN bodies. Where WTO exceeds the UN is in the publication of most documents that it produces, including negotiating documents.

5. Openness is not, however, a matter of WTO documents or ‘court TV’ such as experiments with the televising of presentations before a disputes panel. No matter how WTO Members choose to conduct their business, the management of the trading system faces a fundamental challenge: governments dispose of laws, regulations and policies but private interests produce, consume, trade and invest. The openness of the system that matters is the relationship between WTO member governments and their own constituents. More often than not, to judge from the research for “Manging the Challenges of WTO Participation”, this relationship is less open and responsive than it should be. Two bad consequences for the WTO flow from this problem. First, the Organization is blamed for inadequacies in the trading system that are due to the failure of understanding between Members and their own business or CSO community. Second, the failure of communication between governments and domestic interests in their dealings with each means the trading system sometimes misallocates its priorities or addresses the wrong problems.

6. WTO has done a very good job in technical assistance, reaching out to small, remote and poor Members. The extra-budget resources available to WTO for assistance to developing country members now stands at about $30 million each year. WTO has made the most of this small fund, disbursing 50% or more of the current balance in recent years in a range of generally well-designed and effective programs for ‘capacity building’ and for ensuring that Members with scarce policy resources or without Geneva representation are kept abreast of negotiations. What WTO cannot manage are the transfers that its trade reform agenda really call for. The expected increments in global welfare for example, following the elimination of export subsidies, are not distributed in line with human needs, so there is a good case for the ‘winners’ from global redistribution to compensate the losers. Somehow the link between the agreement to reform/redistribute and the transfers needed for more ‘equitable’ distributions is always weak; declarations notwithstanding.

7. The price of Accession continues to inflate. It has become a barrier to membership for least-developed countries and for transition economies. Efforts before Cancun to accelerate the process for the least-developed economies have slackened. Why does this matter? Because WTO membership is the ‘gold standard’ for external commercial policy, it has an impact on the investment profile of even the poorest developing countries. Do they have the capacity to manage participation? Not at a high level, in most cases. But mostly passive membership and a minium standard of compliance with the concessional standards expected of LDCs does not cost much and membership of WTO provides access to assistance from the Secretariat and from capacity-building funds donated by other Members. Of course LDCs, too, have commercial interests to defend in the trading system and can do so, with some external help, very effectively as the African Cotton campaign demonstrates.

8. One of the greatest fears about the new WTO Agreements was that the most radical of its experiments—the new system of legalistic, short-schedule, compulsory adjudication—would become a source of new and inflexible ‘law’. It hasn’t happened. The Appellate Body has acquired some trappings that would have raised eye-brows in the GATT (whose officials stayed resolutely in Bagheot’s second-class carriage). It has also experimented with procedures and access to the disputes system in a way that Members have not all approved. But the only consequences of these essays was that it quickly became clear who was in charge: the Members. The AB has not made law, although some will always interpret discretionary approaches such as that taken in Shrimp/Turtle to be on the borders of legislation. The strengths of the new system and of the AB in particular are, however, the outstanding impression after ten years. A big case-load, in which the majority of disputes are going to a panel and on to appeal, has been managed expertly with the lasting benefits not only of peace in the trading system but also of new insight into the nature and content of the treaties that lie at its heart.

9. The biggest challenges lie outside the ‘market access agenda’. Many senior officials in Member governments and in the WTO secretariat are my contemporaries with perhaps three decades of involvement in the system, one way or another. After so many years we have, naturally, an institutional bias in our vision of the trading system. We are inclined to believe that the subjects of the Agreements must be the matters of most importance: subsidies, duties of different kinds, quotas, preferences, negotiating rights, schedules … etc etc. But we are wrong to think so and we’re getting wronger every day. If you take the time to ask almost any exporter (or importer) what’s important, these matters will come near the bottom of the list. They’re sometimes significant, but rarely as important as ‘red tape’, corruption, shipping delays, documentation problems, arbitrary decision-making by low-level officials managing for example declarations of origin or certification of compliance, and lack of consistency in, or information about, the requirements of regulatory agencies such as customs, quarantine and fiscal authorities. From a trader’s viewpoint, the things we think mattter most are conditions that apply to all competitors in the market-place and, consequently, have little if any competitive impact. The fact is that the traditional ‘market access agenda’ is about liberalization for reasons that economists know are good for productivity and wealth, but it has much less significance for private interests. Is this a change? Hasn’t this always been the case? Yes; but now it’s more important because the relative impact of the subjects of the ‘market access agenda’ is falling further as liberalization takes hold (as it has on a mostly autonomous basis since the early 1990s). Also, the effect of globalization, particularly in manufactures, is to increase the level of intra-trade within each industry. This means that trading firms, inlcuding SMEs, are exchanging many intermediate products across borders and internalizing border costs and processes in their supply chains. This has dramatically increased their vulnerability to the things that are NOT part of the ‘market access agenda’ (corruption, regulatory harrassment, manipulation of standards and packaging requirements).

10. The system now needs regional trade agreements. The problems that trading businesses nominate as most important may fall under the umbrella of ‘trade facilitation’: but if they do, how will WTO negotiate on them? What will it mean to have obligations on corruption, or port efficiency? How will they be characterized? If such agreements can be reached, who will pay for them. No obligation is ‘free’ and changes to the operations of ports or customs or communications systems can be very costly. Presumably the additional efficiencies will contribute to productivity and wealth in the participating countries, but the threshold investments are likely to be large and the gamble on the discounted future benefits will be courageous for some countries. Many of them will need help. Where will it come from? The experience of the Uruguay Round strongly suggests that there will be more promises than performance on funding. Regional agreements are likely to be a surer bet. Almost by definition, these agreements group countries that already trade intensively; seen from a trade facilitation perspective, they group the greatest beneficiaries of facilitation measures in any particular economy. The agreements are also able to cover a range of obligations and measures of cooperation that extend far beyond the ‘market access agenda’, in part because surveillance of complex agreements is possible at close quarters.

Tags for this entry: trade  wto  trade-framework  book  history 

A few days in Hong Kong

Posted by pwg on Thursday, December 15, 2005

I will be speaking at an academic conference in Hong Kong on Friday at the invitation of Prof Henry Gao at Hong Kong University. My talk will be based on WTO: The First Ten Years which appeared a week or so back.

It will be good to catch up with many friends who will also be in Hong Kong but—alas—there is no reason to disagree much with this skeptical assessment from The Economist of the state of the Doha negotiations at the beginning of the Ministerial meeting

I don’t agree with the authors about the emphasis … but that’s a quibble in view of the broader malaise facing the negotiations:

“The Doha round has always been very unlikely to end in fully free trade. Yet even by more modest standards, it has ended up with the wrong emphasis. Worse, it has been plagued by a lack of ambition on the part of the poor as much as the rich.”(Economist.com)

PS. For any readers of this website who are in Hong Kong and would like to catch up, I am staying at the Ramada Hong Kong. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Or, if you know my Australian mobile phone number, that should work too.

Tags for this entry: trade  wto  hong kong  Page 2 of 94 pages  <  1 2 3 4 >  Last »