Brazil has changed its negotiation strategy in World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations. In the first half of the WTO era (1995–), Brazil adopted a strong developing country leadership role as coordinator and spokesperson of the G20 group of developing countries. More recently, however, this group has disappeared from the negotiation scene. This article examines how Brazil has departed from a 2000 status quo and arrived at a more flexible approach, less reliant on the industrialized-developing divide as a structuring principle of its diplomacy. Using WTO negotiation documents, trade delegate interviews, dispute settlement case law, and secondary literature, I outline the contours of new directions in Brazilian trade policy. These include joint legislative initiatives with the EU, a move towards the plurilateral level on non-traditional issues, a greater heterogeneity of dispute settlement targets, and a newly flexible handling of its rights under the WTO's special and differential treatment status. The article contributes to ongoing debates on Brazil's status in international affairs, its reliance on large coalitions, and the maintenance of followership as key directives of its foreign policy, and scholarship that sees Brazil as stuck in a ‘graduation dilemma’.

The trade of intermediates now accounts for a growing share of global trade. In this highly fragmented global production system, any change in tariff rates can generate a higher impact than that of initial direct tariffs. To assess the impact of tariffs on global value chain participation, this study uses value-added trade statistics and cumulative tariff rates for 12 sectors from 168 countries for the years 1990–2015. The visual inspection suggests that initial tariffs result in higher tariff rates (almost 14%) due to a knock-on impact along with supply chains. The main empirical finding is that both faced and imposed tariff rates have significant negative impacts on sectoral global value chain participation. The effect is also persistent in the analysis if we employ cumulative tariff rates. Apart from these policy determinants, sector- and country-level endowments, such as higher relative length, capital intensity, foreign direct investment stock, and human capital appear to be the major drivers for higher total, forward, and backward global value chains participation. Even if our main results are robust, there are also some distinctions in the effects of tariff rates depending on the country- and sector-level heterogeneities. In a policy-related debate, given the cascading impacts of these liberalization initiatives, autonomous, regional, and global liberalization efforts are critical for all sectors to reap the benefits from the global production system.

The recent change towards advanced technologies favors skill-intensive labor, motivating workers to upgrade their educational achievements to the tertiary level. However, workers in many developing countries cannot exploit the opportunity for premium wages in skill-intensive sectors owing to insufficient education facilities and resources. In such contexts, aid to education provides a capacity-building tool to eliminate the insufficiency but is often unsuccessful. Using theories of trade and human capital, this study argues that complementarity between education aid and skill-intensive manufactured exports creates a synergistic effect in upgrading educational achievements by rectifying both structural and incentive constraints. Through extensive data analysis, the result demonstrates that skill-intensive exports enhance aid's effectiveness in increasing tertiary school enrollment, whereas neither exports nor aid alone significantly affect enrollment. It further shows that the aid–export complementarity is less relevant in low-income countries, whereas skill-intensive exports alone promote education upgrading in developed countries via the Stolper–Samuelson effect.

In this contribution, we exploit machine learning techniques to evaluate whether and how close firms are to become successful exporters. First, we train various algorithms using financial information on both exporters and non-exporters in France in 2010–2018. Thus, we show that it is possible to predict the distance non-exporters are from export status. In particular, we find that a Bayesian Additive Regression Tree with Missingness In Attributes (BART-MIA) performs better than other techniques with an accuracy of up to 0.90. Predictions are robust to changes in definitions of exporters and in the presence of discontinuous exporting activity. Eventually, we discuss how our exporting scores can be helpful for trade promotion, trade credit, and assessing aggregate trade potential. For example, back-of-the-envelope estimates show that a representative firm with just below-average exporting scores needs up to 44% more cash resources and up to 2.5 times more capital to get to foreign markets.

This paper examines the legal ramifications of using tariff flexibility arising from GATT unbound tariff lines or tariff overhangs under both WTO and preferential trade agreement (PTA) law when flexibility is exercised preferentially for PTA partners. Under WTO law, a WTO member that is a party to a PTA under GATT Article XXIV is required to use tariff flexibility on a non-discriminatory basis. However, PTA obligations including tariff elimination commitments and a standstill clause prohibit the WTO member from raising applied tariffs on imports from the PTA parties, thereby preventing the use of tariff flexibility on a non-discriminatory manner. In contrast, a WTO member entering into a PTA under the Enabling Clause may use tariff flexibility discriminatorily without violating WTO law. A WTO member has greater legal latitude in utilizing tariff flexibility if it forms a PTA under the Enabling Clause rather than under GATT Article XXIV. The discriminatory exercise of tariff flexibility by some WTO members in conformity with PTA obligations, but in violation of WTO law, is further evidence of the fragmentation of the world trading system, where WTO law is facing its limits.

This Article identifies the problems of an Appellate Mechanism for ISDS Tribunals in relation with its possible benefits. We propose the inclusion of certain design features to improve the working of an eventual Appellate Mechanism and help mitigate problems related to procedural, conflict resolution, and substantive concerns. We finish by identifying the most central problems with a possible Appellate Mechanism, which helps to narrow down options within the ongoing reform process at UNCITRAL. Overall, we illustrate how institutional choice is always contextual and that all institutional options are imperfect and subject to important trade-offs.

To preserve the functioning of WTO dispute settlement following the blockage of the Appellate Body, a sub-set of WTO Members created the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA). In the wake of the first appeal award rendered under the MPIA, this contribution describes how the MPIA process works and lists some of the innovations that can be found in the first MPIA procedure. More innovations can be expected as arbitration under Article 25 of the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) (be it ad hoc or under the MPIA) can be adjusted and molded case-by-case by the disputing parties in their appeal arbitration agreements. In this sense, the MPIA can serve not only as an interim stop-gap to preserve WTO dispute settlement. It can also function as a laboratory to explore and test new ways of making WTO dispute settlement more efficient and in line with WTO Members' goals and interests: experimental reform by doing, rather than one-off, formal DSU review.

This paper offers a comprehensive study of the jurisprudence on the ‘as a result of unforeseen developments’ test under the WTO's safeguards (SG) rules. It contributes to the existing scholarship by making three fresh arguments. First, the Appellate Body's decision to ‘revive’ this test as a prerequisite for the application of SG measures is not necessarily incompatible with the drafting record of the SG Agreement, even though this agreement does not make explicit reference to the test. Second, the test is not excessively difficult to satisfy under the standard of review established by case law, even though governments failed to pass it in almost all SG disputes to date. Third, in sharp contrast, the recent US–Safeguard Measure on PV Products decision took a strikingly more deferential approach which fell far short of the established standard of review, leading to the first and only decision in which the test was found to be satisfied. This decision has arguably created a new standard which could lead to abuse of SG measures and damage to the dispute settlement system and hence should be avoided in future disputes.

This paper tests the hypothesis pertaining to the interdependencies between trade and environmental policies in the presence of industry/firm lobbies, which is captured through industry/firm size. For an unbalanced panel of manufacturing firms in India at the five-digit National Industrial Classification (NIC), 2008 for the period 2008–2019, I find that firm size has a positive and significant impact on trade policy. The same holds true for a subset of firms that are polluting in nature (based on the Central Pollution Control Board classification). It is found that larger firms have a greater influence on those trade policies that are set unilaterally by the government. Also, there is no empirical support in favour of trade and environment linkages in the Indian context. This could be due to the fact that these two policies come under the domain of independent ministries of the government. Moreover, environmental safety assumes less significance and tends to adversely affect the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector. Notwithstanding the fact that environmental regulations are in place, the enforcement and monitoring mechanisms are remarkably weak on account of weak environmental institutions.