The last couple of years have been an eventful time for trade policy and in particular for major preferential trade agreements (PTAs), such as the so-called mega-regionals. Early 2016, twelve Pacific Rim countries, including Canada and the United States (USA), signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Around the same time, Canada and the European Union (EU) agreed at the level of negotiators to conclude the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Finally, the USA and the EU continued their efforts to find common ground in the negotiations towards the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) treaty.

The introductory chapter outlines key factors that we expect to shape global trade regulation for years to come. We briefly discuss how these factors put pressure on trade governance to adapt and to change. We also summarize the rationale for the various sections and the individual contributions to the volume.

International migration is a relative newcomer on the “trade and” agenda and has hitherto received relatively little attention in trade and migration studies alike. The inclusion of labour migration as one essential mode of cross-border trade in services, so-called Mode 4 in the GATS, opened the agenda for more far-reaching developments at the level of regional and bilateral free-trade agreements . This chapter shows that this deepening of the trade-migration nexus is intricately linked to power shifts in the global economy and the rise of regionalism. For the international trade regime in 2025, this means that, in combination with the ongoing power transitions, the trade-related mobility agenda is likely to expand beyond what the former sponsors of the GATS agreement, the European Union (EU) and the United States, originally intended.

In recent years, the negotiation of various trade agreements, such as the TPP, TTIP and CETA, has been accompanied by a large public backlash. Are we observing a paradigm shift in public perception of world trade or just temporary shifts in public support for the global economic order that oscillate around a more or less steady level? This chapter provides an overview of the major determinants of support for or opposition against PTAs and discusses how much room to maneuver policy makers have in designing such agreements. Furthermore, we discuss what policy makers can do to increase support for such agreements. We thereby focus on framing strategies and provide an analysis of which types of arguments are conducive to increase support for PTAs and how individuals process such information. This allows us to construct different future scenarios for policy makers to better align the negotiation and design of future trade agreements with the demand of their constituencies.

After three decades of companionship, investment protection rules and trade agreements are heading for a divorce. Investment chapters have been included in preferential trade and investment agreements (PTIAs) since the late 1980s, but they have recently come under fire. The U.S. administration considers privately enforceable investment protection obligations as an unwanted incentive to offshore American jobs, and the EU Commission seeks to omit them to benefit from the accelerated ratification process reserved for trade agreements that fall under exclusive EU competency. After decades of coexistence, investment protection rules and trade agreements are thus likely to go their separate ways. This chapter empirically evaluates the impact of their thirty-year companionship to assess the implications of their looming split. It finds that investment chapters remain little more than a bilateral investment treaty plugged into a trade agreement. PTIAs and self-standing investment treaties do not vary systematically in investment protection content, and the wider trade agreement context does little to affect the interpretation of investment rules in PTIAs. In spite of their coexistence in the same treaty, there is thus little evidence of cross-fertilization between trade and investment protection rules in PTIAs. This absence of normative convergence suggests that their looming split merely formalizes the continuous normative distinction between trade liberalization and investment protection.

This chapter first characterizes the fundamental purposes of the WTO and trade agreements, which should be viewed as much broader than trade liberalization. It then presents the major challenges that the trade system now faces. Special emphasis is paid to technological change since the WTO was created in 1995, namely, the development of global value chains. Finally, the author contends that trade agreements, in response, must be designed and conditioned upon social policy commitments. They should include, or be conditioned upon, agreements that cover: coordinated tax policy to combat harmful tax competition, tax avoidance, and tax evasion; domestic social security and job retraining, supported by trade adjustment commitments; labor protection; protections against social dumping; and accommodation of industrial policy experimentation for development. It will not be an easy process to reconceive trade agreements to better ensure social inclusion through these means, but the current system otherwise could unravel.