Developmental Responses to the International Trade Legal Game - Examples of Intellectual Property and Export Credit Law Reforms in Brazil

Abstract

The paper departs from two cases dealing with the impacts of the global trade regime rules, implemented with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its assembled agreements, in domestic regulation in Brazil, and the succeeding alternative development strategies undertaken by the country either at the national or the international levels. The selected examples are about intellectual property regulation and the HIV policy, and public institutional arrangements on trade finance to the civil aircraft sector. The WTO rules applied in these fields – trade related intellectual property rights and subsidies rules – have been condemned as the most restrictive ones to developing countries’ policy spaces. The concerned agreements impose high standards of regulation focusing on leveling the playing field for world exporters, which limits the governments’ intervention in those areas. Flexibilities, however, were also admitted by the WTO system, although most of them were not self-evident. The two stories reported in this paper account for the public and private struggle in Brazil that led to modifications in the Brazilian legal system as a reaction to WTO restrictions. The purpose of the paper is to go beyond the argument that the WTO trade regime limits developmental policies by demonstrating how the changes in the international regulation has provoked new creative arrangements inside a country like Brazil, and how it has changed the strategies of Brazil before other international fora. Brazilian legal reforms and development policies should not be understood solely as “models” to be replicated, but examples that may provide legal ideas and tools to international legal constraints to developing countries in the trade game.