WTO Accession from the Perspective of WTO Members: The View from the Other Side of the Table
I wrote this paper in 2006 for the Islamic Development Bank’s seminar on WTO accession issues for selected OIC member countries, held in Jeddah on 28–29 March. By then, I had spent about three years advising governments in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe on their efforts to join the World Trade Organization. The paper was a synthesis of what I had learned, with a deliberate shift in perspective: what did the countries already inside the WTO want from those seeking to join?
Sitting on the other side of the table
At the time, I was also serving part-time as a WTO delegate for one of the Central Asian economies that had acceded early. That gave me an unusually useful vantage point. I could sit in on and participate in the accession working parties of other candidate countries as a representative of an existing Member, while drawing on my experience of advising applicants.
Much of the discussion of accession understandably centres on the demands placed on the applicant. But those demands make more sense when you understand the interests of the governments making them. The Members across the table were pursuing their own commercial priorities, concerns about the trading system and, sometimes, bilateral issues that extended beyond trade.
What Members wanted
The paper distinguishes between three broad sets of interests: market access, systemic issues and matters that were not specifically trade-related. It then examines how those interests played out in agriculture and intellectual property.
One of the things that struck me was how consistently particular Members returned to their own “pet” issues. Accession also gave neighbouring countries an opportunity to bring longstanding bilateral concerns into a multilateral negotiation, at a moment when they had unusual leverage over the applicant.
Reaching agreement with the major trading powers could take an applicant a long way towards the finish line. But it did not guarantee that the remaining negotiations would be a formality. A single Member determined to secure an outcome on a particular issue could still make the process very difficult. Understanding those priorities was therefore an essential part of preparing for accession.
An education in how government works
For me, the lasting value of working on WTO accession was the breadth of exposure it provided. This is a genuinely disruptive process for the government undertaking it. Its effects reach well beyond the ministry of commerce or economy leading the negotiations, into ministries of agriculture, central banks, intellectual property agencies and many other parts of the state.
Working through those questions taught me how international commitments translate into changes in domestic laws, institutions and administrative practice. It also showed me how much coordination is required across agencies whose priorities, responsibilities and ways of working can be very different.
I wrote the paper shortly before leaving the World Trade Institute in Berne, where I had worked for almost six years. My next role was as a legal adviser embedded in Indonesia’s Ministry of Trade. Looking back, the accession work was an invaluable preparation for that move: it had given me a view of trade policy as something that runs through the whole machinery of government.
Read the paper
WTO Accession from the Perspective of WTO Members: The View from the Other Side of the Table, Simon Lacey. Written on 1 March 2006. A final version appeared in New Reflections on International Trade, edited by Jeremy Streatfeild and Simon Lacey (Cameron May, 2007). The SSRN version was posted on 20 May 2008 and last revised on 30 December 2008.
Download the full paper (PDF) · View the paper on SSRN
Listing photograph: Centre William-Rappard, Geneva, 2023, © Jérémy Toma, CC BY-SA 4.0. Displayed with a square crop and colour filter; the adapted photograph is available under the same licence.
Have a question or want to discuss my work? Get in touch on LinkedIn.