Regional Integration

The number of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) has skyrocketed in recent years, not least due to lack of progress in liberalizing trade at the multilateral level. In the first 46 years of its existence, as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the multilateral regime received notification of 124 such agreements. Since the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, it has received another 260 or so (of which more than 200 are still active), with an exponentially growing number in the planning or negotiation stages.

While the main focus of many such agreements remains on exports and market access, they are increasingly branching out into other areas, such as intellectual property rights, environmental governance and even investment, thereby providing an alternative avenue for promoting trade interests that have failed to make headway in international negotiations. In some instances, bilateral or regional cooperation may indeed provide a suitable forum for promoting sustainable development-supportive trade liberalization, while in other instances FTAs can be skewed in favour of the stronger trading partner at the expense of countries with limited economic clout and negotiating capacities.

TKN research aims to provide constructive input into bilateral and regional negotiating processes to help better understand the implications of different negotiating options for sustainable development and how these processes relate to other negotiations and agreements at the bilateral, regional and multilateral levels.



Research