Evaluation of the Terms of Accession to the WTO: A Comparative Assessment of Services and Goods Sector Commitments by Members and Acceding Countries (Economic Paper Series)
Год выпуска: 2006 Издательство: Страниц: 80 ISBN: 085092832X
Описание
The relevant provisions for accession to the WTO, mainly entrenched in Article XII of the Marrakech Agreement, do not provide adequate legal basis for the process, the terms and conditions of which are based on "terms to be agreed" between the existing Members and the applicant nations. The inherent flaws in the process have resulted in demands on acceding countries, which are invariably onerous and bear little or no relation to their size, significance, or development status.The paper uses econometric tools to conduct a comparative assessment of commitments in the goods and services sectors. For the services sector, the paper finds that at all three levels of services classification the commitments of post-Uruguay Round acceding countries far exceed those of their WTO member counterparts. In the goods sector, apart from the much greater binding coverage rate, the bound tariff rate for acceding countries is much lower than their WTO member counterparts. The paper also provides...