Our Research Output
List of Publications & Presentations by Members of the «Trade Packages» Team
Greenwashing: From general Suspicion to the Offense
The uncertainty surrounding sustainability promises makes it clear that sustainability is not only based on facts, data and figures, but above all on trust. Even the suspicion of greenwashing can shake this. Increasing regulation is intended to provide a stabilizing framework and empower sustainable consumption and investment decisions. At the same time, it creates excessive legal risks by attaching legal consequences to undefined terms. The articles in this book range from Swiss and European law to corporate responsibility, the financial market and criminal prosecution.
US Customs Policy: an Impetus for international Trade Law?
The origins of today’s international trade law date back to 1930, when WTO member states committed themselves to maximum tariffs and compliance with the most-favored-nation principle. Permissible exceptions include free trade agreements, developing countries and anti-dumping, countervailing and safeguard duties. In recent years, new challenges have arisen, which are not taken into account in current law. The introduction of reciprocal tariffs by the USA threatens to overturn the previous consensus, which is why an urgently needed modernization of international customs rules is required.
Trump, Tariffs and Free Trade: what Future for international Trade?
Between the return of tariffs and geopolitical tensions, the dynamics of international trade are in a state of flux. Cédric Dupont (Professor of International Relations at the Geneva Graduate Institute) and Olarreaga Marcelo (Professor of International Economics at the University of Geneva, Geneva School of Economics and Management) analyze the virtues of free trade and the geopolitical consequences of a trade slowdown. They discuss what strategies are now necessary for Switzerland.
Multilateral Rules on Trade in Goods: Tariff Barriers
This chapter introduces the role of tariffs in the emergence of international economic law, and shows how the economic and political significance of tariffs has changed over time. It proceeds to the negotiation of the GATT 1947, the quasi-constitutional basis for multilateral rules on tariff barriers in trade in goods, and provides an overview over the profound impact of Art. I GATT 1947 (the Most-Favoured Nation Principle) on the structure of the global market today.
Switzerland has few Options against the Tariffs
The tariffs imposed by Trump are a violation of international law on economic growth. However, those who now react with counter-tariffs would be doing exactly the same thing and legitimizing the American breach of international trade law in the first place. What options are left?
Will environmental Treaties survive the Crisis of Multilateralism?
International law on environmental protection has numerous tools and texts, starting with those produced since the 1990s in the wake of the famous COPs. However, the effort expended by the various stakeholders to produce them requires adaptability to a changing context. The arrival in power of climate sceptic multilateralists, especially in the United States, represents a major threat to the future application of these provisions.
Future-proofing Environmental Treaties: Strategies for Adaptability
International environmental agreements (IEA) span various issues such as climate change, marine pollution, agriculture, migratory species, fisheries, transboundary watersheds, energy, waste management, and forest preservation. The static frameworks of some of these treaties, which fail to anticipate emerging challenges, highlight a critical need for more dynamic and forward-looking mechanisms in international environmental lawmaking.
Bolstering Environmental Governance With Trade Agreements: The Role and Challenges of Citizen Complaints
Incorporating environmental provisions into free trade agreements creates opportunities to address environmental protection failures. In particular, trade agreements can enable public participation in environmental governance. A key mechanism in that regard is the Submissions on Enforcement Matters (SEM) process created by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and replicated in several trade agreements concluded by the United States (US).
Global Value Chains
Chapter 11 in: The Concept Design of a 21st Century Preferential Trade Agreement
Increased production fragmentation and the resulting rise in intermediates trade have changed the composition and structure of international trade flows. Today, most of global trade is conducted along global value chains (GVCs). However, recent events, such as the financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have exposed the fragility of GVCs. This chapter discusses the role of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) to foster GVC resilience.
A Domestic Political Economy of Package Treaties
The post-World War II liberal international order coupled trade liberalization with a range of flanking measures, both outward-looking and inward-looking. This system, coupling domestic-level compensation with international-level flexibility, no longer functions as effectively as it once did. To consider how a renewed set of flanking policies might address, or even prevent, a backlash against trade liberalization, we explore why the earlier system (embedded liberalism plus temporarily tolerated relief) did not always function effectively.
Addressing the Negative Externalities of Trade: Flanking Policies and the Role of Package Treaties
This article examines the rationales for addressing sustainability and social inclusion in trade policy and the tradeoffs among imperfect institutional choices in doing so through ‘flanking policies’. It examines three types of negative spillovers or externalities implicated by trade: material, moral, and social/political.
Second Generation Flanking Policies: Addressing Extraterritorial and Non-Economic Costs of Trade Liberalization
Flanking policies – policies that aim to address potential negative effects of trade liberalization, and/or the concerns of domestic stakeholders regarding those negative effects, and that are either legally or factually linked to trade liberalization – have been a critical component of international trade policy since at least 1962. Over the years, however, flanking policies have changed. This Article argues that there is a heretofore unnoticed distinction between what I term first-generation flanking policies and second-generation flanking policies.
Operationalizing Package Treaties: A US Case Study
This article studies the incorporation of package treaties in domestic law and administrative practice, including the functions these treaties serve once in force. The typology for understanding how governments situate package treaties in their domestic regulatory spaces is introduced, arguing that the ‘package’ of legally binding trade liberalization commitments and mutually agreed flanking policies is shaped by both legislative and regulatory choices that are often underestimated and overlooked.
Identifying Spillovers of Trade Agreements through Impact Assessments: A New Database
In the past decades, a backlash against globalization has been brewing, especially in advanced economies. Despite this backlash being only partly determined by trade, we observe an increasing demand for transparency on procedures, methodologies, and results. To help us identify spillovers of trade liberalization, we construct a country and sector-specific database of impact assessments.
Addressing Negative Effects of Trade Liberalization: Unilateral and Mutually Agreed Flanking Policies
The conventional approach to trade liberalization has been to liberalize trade through international agreement and address subsequent domestic fallout and spillovers through domestic policies. In consequence, international obligations in trade liberalization are not legally connected with ‘flanking’ measures to address their negative effects. We discuss the shortcomings of this conventional approach with respect to labor adjustment and environmental protection.
Introduction to the Special Issue on Package Treaties
Globalization generates benefits for nations around the world, but it also creates winners and losers within nations. As former WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy puts it: ‘Globalization works because it is painful, and it is painful because it works’.1 This is why international economic integration inevitably creates a collective action problem; opposition by losers may thwart policies that would benefit nations overall.
Sweetening the Liberalisation Pill: Flanking Measures to Free Trade Agreements
Free trade agreement (FTA) negotiators increasingly face pressure from domestic interest groups, including environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil activists and labor unions. As a result of the growing scrutiny on the content of FTAs, we are now witnessing a proliferation of instruments accompanying FTAs, which we group under the label of flanking measures.
CTEI experts discuss the future of trade policy in view of the recent re-election of Donald Trump
The re-election of Donald Trump has reignited debates about the future of global trade policy, bringing issues such as protectionism, the role of free trade agreements, and Switzerland’s economic positioning to the forefront. Two of our distinguished researchers at CTEI, Charlotte Sieber-Gasser and Cédric Dupont, recently explored these topics in separate interviews, sharing insights in their respective languages.
How to make EU unilateral trade and sustainability policies work for the global South?
This policy brief outlines the challenges of unilateral trade policies for the Global South based on ongoing research on EUDR and RED, and presents actionable policy recommendations, addressing a key question: where to focus efforts to mitigate the negative spillovers of unilateral trade measures and how?
Sustainability Standards which Work for All: How Trade Policy Can Protect Forests and Livelihoods
Deforestation-related emissions are a major contributor to climate change, exacerbated by international trade in agricultural products and timber. To combat forest loss, high-income countries are increasingly linking market access to sustainability standards. For instance, the EU deforestation regulation bans specific commodities from entering its market if they are not sustainably produced. However, such unilaterally imposed sustainability standards can cause unintended distributional effects, reinforcing existing inequalities.
A springboard or a safeguard? The repercussions of affinity on environmental treaties’ adaptability
If international environmental agreements (IEAs) are to remain relevant over time, the institutional capacity to adjust them to changing circumstances, referred to here as adaptability, is an important asset. Yet, while some IEAs include various adaptability features, others do not. This paper develops the concept of affinity, defined as the varying sense of connection between negotiating countries, and argues affinity is a major driver of adaptability variation.
Searching for a recipe for success: environmental citizen petitions under free trade agreements
Submissions on enforcement matters (SEMs) allow civil society members to assert that one party to a free trade agreement is failing to enforce its domestic environmental laws. Relying on qualitative comparative analysis and an original dataset compiling the 158 SEMs submitted under the framework of US FTAs, I investigate what conditions make submissions more likely to succeed in leading to a factual record.
Introduction to symposium supply chain trade in Africa: Retrospect and prospect
The symposium focuses on the evolution and determinants of Africa’s participation in Global Value Chains (GVC) through comparisons with other continents, but also across countries within Africa. Using firm, sector and country-level data they provide a comprehensive micro and macroeconomic analysis of GVC in Africa that helps inform policymakers aiming at increasing Africa’s participation in GVC.
Measuring misreporting at customs
Trade economists measure misreporting at the importer’s customs by comparing the export value reported at the exporter’s customs with the import value reported at the importer’s customs. The more significant the gap, the larger the extent of misreporting by the importer motivated by incentives to under-invoice to avoid customs taxes.
Rules of origin and exporters’ value-added
We explore the non-monotonic relationship between the restrictiveness of rules of origin (ROO) and beneficiaries’ value-added embedded in preferential exports. Using data for the European Union’s GSP schemes, we calculate the value-added maximizing level of ROO restrictiveness. Results suggest that current levels of restrictiveness in the European Union’s GSP schemes are not statistically different from optimal levels.
Child labour and global value chains
We explore the relationship between the internationalisation of production through Global Value Chains and child labour at the sector level, using data from 26 low- and middle-income countries. We find that sectors with stronger participation in foreign markets by exporting inputs to firms that will process them and export them to third countries (forward linkages) exhibit less child labour.
(New) EU Standards in Preferential Services Trade Liberalisation
While the European Union (EU) is exporting more services to non-EU countries (€1.072 trillion in 2019) than it imports, services appear to not particularly enjoy priority in EU preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This chapter assesses the scope of services trade liberalization in EU PTAs. Standardization can be found in new EU rules in a number of internet-related services, in delivery services, in temporary movement of natural persons, and in procedures for mutual recognition.
Addressing Negative Effects of Trade Liberalization: Unilateral and Mutually Agreed Flanking Policies
The conventional approach to trade liberalization has been to liberalize trade through international agreement and address subsequent domestic fallout and spillovers through domestic policies. In consequence, international obligations in trade liberalization are not legally connected with ‘flanking’ measures to address their negative effects. We discuss the shortcomings of this conventional approach with respect to labor adjustment and environmental protection: for political reasons, trade liberalization requires today the simultaneous regulation of labor and environmental spillovers.
Trade Packages 