Research On The Plurilateral Agreement Model Under The Framework Of WTO

At present,the global governance system has undergone profound changes,the WTO,which once played an important role in the process of globalization,is facing unprecedented challenges.Since the start of the Doha Round in 2001,only one multilateral trade agreement,the Trade Facilitation Agreement,has been reached,and multilateral trade negotiations have essentially stalled.This has led to insufficient supply of WTO trade rules,which lags behind the development of global economy and trade.At the same time,the emerging regional trade agreements pose a threat to multilateral negotiations and make global rules fragmented.In the face of the crisis of the multilateral trading system,WTO members have submitted plans to call for the modern reform of WTO rules.The plurilateral agreement model is considered to be a realistic path that may break through the negotiation dilemma under the current situation.In fact,some members have already initiated plurilateral negotiations on topics such as e-commerce,small,medium and micro enterprises,investment facilitation,domestic regulation of service trade,trade and sustainability,plastics pollution and environmentally sustainable plastics trade,fossil oil subsidies in the form of a joint statement initiative.However,some members represented by India and South Africa expressed strong opposition to this,which led to an unclear prospect for the negotiation.Even if the results of the negotiations are reached,they may not be included in the WTO system and reinvigorate WTO negotiation functions.Therefore,there is an urgent need for a systematic study of the plurilateral agreement model.The plurilateral agreement model under the WTO system means that some WTO members with similar views reach an agreement on a certain topic,including closed plurilateral agreements and open plurilateral agreements.The former applies to the principle of consensus,but does not apply to the most-favored-nation treatment,mainly represented by the Government Procurement Agreement;the latter applies the mostfavored-nation principle,but not the consensus principle,mainly represented by the Information Technology Agreement.Then,under the current background,can the plurilateral agreement model become the path to the reform of the WTO negotiation mechanism?Answering this question has important theoretical and practical significance.This paper focuses on this issue and systematically studies the plurilateral trade agreement model from three perspectives:history,reality and the future.First of all,the plurilateral agreement model originated from the code approach of Tokyo round.In the Uruguay round,some codes were incorporated into the WTO legal system as plurilateral agreement model.After the Uruguay round,a new plurilateral agreement model,represented by the Information Technology Agreement,emerged.From the perspective of negotiation effect,the Tokyo round successfully explored the areas of non-tariff barriers that had not been involved in the previous negotiations by using the code approach,which laid the foundation for the Uruguay Round negotiations.In the Uruguay round,a package of commitments was adopted to incorporate some codes into the WTO legal system after multilateralization,which shows the possibility of multilateralization of the plurilateral agreement model.The incorporation of some codes into the WTO system as plurilateral Trade Agreements reflects the specificity and periodicity of the application of the package of commitments.After the Uruguay Round,the implementation of the Information Technology Agreement has been effective and encouraged other departments to adopt this model for negotiation.From the perspective of generative logic,the formation of plurilateral agreement model is driven by internal and external factors.Internal factors mainly include the setting of topics and the composition of members,while external factors mainly include international political and economic model and trade cooperation paradigm.Second,the plurilateral agreement model is a possible model choice that can improve negotiation efficiency.The results of the existing plurilateral agreement model negotiations have played an important role in the global economy.From the perspective of legal status,the plurilateral agreement model currently has legitimacy within the WTO system.From the perspective of multilateral and regional relations,the plurilateral agreement model remains consistent with the WTO system,and it is reasonable to use it as a reform path.Judging from the analysis based on club theory and critical quantity theory,the plurilateral agreement model is feasible and efficient.Although there have been proposals supporting the WTO to adopt the Plurilateral agreement model for negotiations on some issues,many members have expressed concern about this.Among them,the most fundamental concern is that,from the perspective of economics,members believe that closed plurilateral agreements may lead to exclusiveness,open plurilateral agreements may lead to free riding problems,and there are also some problems such as coordination with multilateral rules,issue setting.This paper uses qualitative and empirical methods to classify and analyze the negotiation results of the existing plurilateral agreement models from the perspective of economics,and discusses their exclusiveness and free riding respectively.The results show that the agreement plays an important role in different ways.Among them,the Government Procurement Agreement,the representative of the closed plurilateral agreement,brings limited export revenue through the opening of the government procurement market.Its main role is to supervise the parties to optimize the domestic system,so as to improve the welfare.Moreover,due to the particularity of the topic,the issue of exclusivity is not serious.The Information Technology Agreement,the representative of the open agreement,has increased the export and import volume of all parties by reducing and canceling tariffs on related products.From the perspective of product structure,the performance of developing countries and developed countries are also different.In addition,the free riding problem is not serious ue to the setting of critical mass.Therefore,in the application of future issues,for domestic institutional issues,the closed plurilateral agreement model can be adopted to avoid exclusivity,while for issues such as product trade liberalization,the open plurilateral agreement model can be adopted and the critical quantity can be specified to reduce free riding.Finally,this paper argues that some members’ economic concerns about the plurilateral agreement model are not as serious as expected.As for the possible problems such as the coordination of rules and the setting of topics in the introduction of plurilateral agreement model,this paper argues that it is necessary to standardize it through reasonable rule design and guide it to develop towards multilateralism.Specifically,the key issues in rule design include procedural rules,differences in member development,topic selection,and rule coordination.Based on the consideration of the above key issues,this paper discusses the possible specific implementation rules,including procedure design,special and differential treatment,topic selection and coordination with multilateral rules.In addition,this paper also examines China’s practice in the plurilateral agreement model.Generally speaking,China is an active participant in the plurilateral agreement model and is gradually becoming a rule leader.