Effects for the Kyrgyz Republic after Joining the WTO

This was one of my earliest conference papers while working at the World Trade Institute in Berne. I prepared it for the EU–LDC Network Conference in Chiang Mai, held on 8–10 October 2002, drawing on a year of work with countries in Central Asia and several visits to the Kyrgyz Republic.

At the time, I was working with countries at different stages of their relationship with the WTO. The Kyrgyz Republic had already joined, while Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were still negotiating accession. That offered a useful opportunity to ask what membership actually meant once the negotiations were over.

Had Kyrgyzstan negotiated a bad deal?

One recurring criticism was that the Kyrgyz Republic had joined too quickly and accepted demanding commitments without giving enough thought to its longer-term economic interests. I wanted to put that argument in perspective by comparing its accession with the terms accepted by other new Members.

The picture was less straightforward than the criticism suggested. Accession was a difficult negotiation for all applicants, particularly those with limited technical expertise and bargaining power. Kyrgyzstan’s experience raised wider questions about the demands placed on new Members, the advice available to them and the gap between their obligations and the protections retained by countries already inside the system.

What happened after joining?

The paper also looked at economic performance before and after accession. I was cautious about drawing simple conclusions: changes in growth and trade coincided with wider financial shocks and difficulties in regional trading relationships. Those figures could not, on their own, establish what WTO membership had caused.

My discussions with officials, academics, parliamentarians and business people revealed more practical concerns. These included access to traditional export markets, transit obstacles and the capacity of domestic agencies to implement the commitments the country had accepted. Officials also wanted promised technical assistance and training to be followed through.

Membership was the beginning

The central lesson I drew was that accession was only the start of the work. A country still needed the institutions, expertise and regional relationships to turn membership into something economically useful, and the capacity to pursue and defend its interests once inside the WTO.

Reading this now, I see an early attempt to connect the legal process of accession with the problems policymakers and businesses were confronting on the ground. It is a record of my thinking in 2002, and of questions that would continue to shape my subsequent work on trade policy.

Read the paper

Effects for the Kyrgyz Republic after Joining the WTO, Simon Lacey. Prepared for the October 2002 conference in Chiang Mai and posted on SSRN on 20 May 2008. The original conference paper is reproduced below.

Download the full paper (PDF) · View the paper on SSRN

Listing photograph: Ala-Too Square, Bishkek, 2023, © Kalpaktravel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Displayed with a square crop and colour filter; the adapted photograph is available under the same licence.

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