Inter‐Governmental Regimes and Recruitment to Private Regimes: GATT/WTO and the ISO, 1951–2005

Sijeong Lim,Aseem Prakash

doi:10.1111/1758-5899.12554

Abstract

AbstractScholars of international relations and public policy recognize that quasi‐private actors supply governance services alongside governmental actors. We explore how membership in the dominant trade regime, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/the World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO) influences countries’ incentives to join the quasi‐private regime, International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Both global regimes seek to remove trade barriers; the former focuses on tariff and non‐tariff obstacles, and the latter on technical barriers. While any firm can subscribe to over 18,000 ISO standards, only national standards bodies, one per country, can become ISO members. We posit that given the substantial political costs of joining GATT/WTO and the relatively low entry barriers to joining the ISO, high trading countries might view the ISO as a (partial) functional equivalent of the GATT/WTO. Our empirical analysis of ISO membership dynamics over the period 1951–2005 lends support to our argument.

Highlights

Scholars of international relations and public policy recognize that quasi-private actors supply governance services alongside governmental actors
The models include a total of 1,688 country-year observations across 95 countries, of which 81 countries joined the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) at some point in time during 1951–2005
We find that for high export countries outside the GATT/WTO system, ISO membership offers one route to at least partially influence the country’s global trading environment

Summary

Choosing trade regimes

Distributional implications of economic openness and its impact on domestic politics have been discussed extensively in the literature (Rogowski, 1989; Stolper and Samuelson, 1941; and more recently Kim, 2017; Osgood, 2017). The country might consider joining a trade regime that is an imperfect functional substitute yet has a substantially lower barrier to entry This might be termed as a moderate benefit-moderate cost scenario. An observable implication is that countries with a high export share of GDP ( export salience) would seek to join ISO, regardless of their membership status in GATT/WTO. Countries might view a private regime as a (partial) functional equivalent of the dominant inter-governmental regime (Borzel and Risse, 2010) As both ISO and GATT/WTO offer an avenue to influence the global trading environment, countries that do not want to or unable to join GATT/WTO due to political concerns would find the ISO attractive.

Reducing trade barriers via global regimes

Findings

Conclusion