Rules of Origin: Squaring the Circle

Rules of origin can look like a technical detail of trade agreements, but they have considerable influence over who actually benefits from preferential market access. As production spreads across countries, deciding where a product “comes from” becomes increasingly difficult—and politically contentious.

In this article, published in the Global Trade and Customs Journal in 2012, I examined whether the competing approaches to preferential rules of origin, particularly those favoured by the European Union and the United States, could be brought under a common multilateral framework. The obstacles were both technical and political: different rules reflected different interests, with beneficiaries reluctant to surrender their advantages.

My broader argument was that the rules themselves were struggling to keep pace with the organisation of global production. Reconciling existing approaches would only take us so far. We also needed to reconsider whether those approaches still made sense in a world where products were increasingly made across borders.

Read the article

Simon Lacey, Multilateral Disciplines on Preferential Rules of Origin: How Far Are We from Squaring the Circle?, Global Trade and Customs Journal, volume 7, issues 11–12 (2012), pages 473–492.

Download the revised paper (PDF) · Journal publication · View on SSRN

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