Law Commons^™

Overcoming The Geneva Impasse: How Regional Trade Agreements Can Help Global Trade, Chin Leng Lim

Chin Leng Lim

The World Trade Organisaton’s rules have permitted regional trade agreements since 1947. Over the years its membership has made only half-hearted efforts to tighten these rules. Without ignoring some well-known drawbacks which attend regional trade agreements, we need to understand the reasons for this hesitancy: regional agreements can help global trade.

‘The Law Works Itself Pure’: The Fragmented Disciplines Of Global Trade And Monetary Cooperation, And The Chinese Currency Problem, Chin Leng Lim

Chin Leng Lim

This chapter considers the long-standing controversy over the Chinese yuan – the primary unit of account of the renminbi, or RMB, the official currency of the People’s Republic of China. The currency valuation interventions of the People’s Bank of China (PBC) have been the subject of international disagreement, not least between the USA and China. Criticism of China in the USA became especially heated during the 2009 to 2012 period, occurring in the aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis and coinciding with the period of the great recession. Other countries, such as Brazil, also drew critical attention to …

The Wages Of Belonging: Rare Earths From China, And The Return Of Gatt À La Carte, Chin Leng Lim, J. H. Senduk

Chin Leng Lim

China has lost the Rare Earths case before a Panel which, however, split 2:1 on whether the Chinese Accession Protocol's general ban on export duties would allow General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Article XX to be invoked. The question affects whether other Recently Acceded Members' (RAMs') WTO-plus terms of accession should generally be read together with the GATT. Export quotas are unproblematic because Article XI is contained in the GATT. China's quota-based conservation measures were however strictly scrutinized, raising other questions about the room RAMs have to invoke Article XX if they might have to depend upon highly …

Regional Trade Agreements And The Poverty Agenda, Chin Leng Lim

Chin Leng Lim

Regional trade agreements (RTAs) comprise customs unions and free trade agreements (FTAs). The difference lies in the absence of a common customs border in the case of customs unions. Thus, countries A and B, which are FTA partners, will nonetheless impose different duties on third-country imports, while at the same time granting preferential treatment to each other. A major criticism is that all RTAs, customs unions and FTAs alike, discriminate against non-parties. In contrast, most favoured nation (MFN) treatment operates in the multilateral system to extend concessions made by any member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to any other …

'You Don't Miss Your Water 'Til Your River Runs Dry': Regulating Industrial Supply Shortages After 'China-Raw Materials', Chin Leng Lim, J. H. Senduk

Chin Leng Lim

Global industrial production depends on stable access to raw inputs. Food price volatility has emerged as a major concern for Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G20), while we are hearing new calls for bringing global disciplines to resource cartels like the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Supply chains that make up globalized production recently demonstrated their potential fragility when Chinese sovereign intervention threatened to bring Japan’s high-tech manufacturing to its knees by cutting off its supplies. These wide-ranging issues are now being addressed under the umbrella of trade regulation. As a result, we are …

East Asia’S Engagement With Cosmopolitan Ideals Under Its Trade Treaty Dispute Provisions, Chin Leng Lim

Chin Leng Lim

An East Asian view about how trade dispute settlement systems should be designed is slowly emerging. This paper argues that democratically-inspired trade law scholarship and cultural explanations of the international law behaviour of the Southeast and Northeast Asian trading nations have failed to capture or prescribe the actual treaty behaviour of these nations. Instead, such behaviour has resulted in the emergence of two different treaty models for the peaceful settlement of trade disputes. This article traces the practices of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), together with that of China, Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. We find two …

The Politics Of Competing Jurisdictional Claims In Wto And Rta Disputes, Chin Leng Lim, Henry S. Gao

Chin Leng Lim

Cast Light And Evil Will Go Away: The Transparency Mechanism For Regulating Regional Trade Agreements Three Years After, Jo-Ann Crawford, Chin Leng Lim

Chin Leng Lim

Our aim is to test the idea that the WTO’s ability to regulate RTAs is likely to decline with the proliferation of RTAs worldwide. According to this idea: (1) “people who live in glass houses should not throw stones”, (2) with the proliferation of RTAs, WTO members are likely to place their interests before the interests of the multilateral system, and (3) there would be fewer WTO members demanding stricter disciplines for RTA regulation. However, our finding is that WTO members have at least continued to accord attention to the problems associated with RTA proliferation, and they continue to engage …

On Free Trade And The Post-American World, Chin Leng Lim

Chin Leng Lim

Amongst the small group of technical and diplomatic experts in the GATT/WTO and trade scholars (the “Gattologists”) whose professional preoccupation has been with global tradenegotiations, the decline of American power had been keenly observed and felt even before the demise of the Cold War. This chapter discusses the insights of the trade specialist against the legacy of American free trade. We need to assess where America stood after World War II, where it is today following a series of significant changes in the distribution of power within the GATT/WTO, and America’s responses. Taking a trade policy perspective is useful because …

China And The Doha Development Agenda, Chin Leng Lim, Jiangyu Wang

Chin Leng Lim

Saving The Wto From The Risk Of Irrelevance: The Wto Dispute Settlement Mechanism As A ‘Common Good’ For Rta Disputes, Henry S. Gao, Chin Leng Lim

Chin Leng Lim

Over the past few decades, Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) have proliferated globally. Such proliferation of RTAs created a renewed sense of urgency for the WTO to take action in order to avoid the fate of being eclipsed into irrelevance. There are several options for coping with the challenge. Theoretically speaking, the best approach would be to heighten the level of ambition in global trade talks to reduce all trade barriers to zero so that the discriminatory effect created by RTAs could be reduced or even eliminated. In reality, such an approach would be impossible for well-known reasons. The next best …