International trade agreements within the GATT-WTO paradigm: a descriptive study based on sociological reflection approach

Abstract

After the end of the Second World War, the second half of the twentieth century brought in, one the one hand, the establishment of GATT provisions in 1947 and the legal texts implemented during its negotiation rounds as a regulatory framework, and on the other hand, the creation in 1995 of the WTO as the central normative entity for international trade. In this way, the states' economic opening strategy focuses on reducing rampant protectionism, usually reflected in tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers as foreign trade policy. Therefore, the GATT-WTO paradigm enhances trade flows between countries as freely as possible, contributing to economic growth and world development. Likewise, the GATT provisions endorsed the creation of many different typologies of trade agreements legitimated by its article XXIV and the Enabling Clause of the Tokyo Round. In this sense, the international trade agreements had a notable growth since the WTO establishment until the Great Recession in 2008. However, it is paradoxical that this approval from the GATT-WTO paradigm regarding the signing of these international trade agreements strengthen regionalism as the easy path, leaving out the multilateralism philosophy of the WTO, where precisely member governments try to solve the trade disputes through its legal framework but not through specific law from trade agreements. In this manner, this research carries out a descriptive study where trade agreements are marked adopting the sociological research scientific approach where a factual question is proposed to analyze the phenomenon. Hence, this paper suggests that the current legal framework in the GATT-WTO paradigm is not dynamic nowadays, pushing countries to sign international trade agreements for promoting commercial exchange and create new rules that, at the multilateral level, the GATT-WTO do not develop for political will absence and particular interests of some full members. A scenario that merely seems to undermine the WTO pushing countries to make parallel rules apart from the traditional multilateralism model giving a more prominent role to regionalism.