It was an exciting time to be in the region. Governments were enthusiastically signing up to a wide variety of trade agreements. For example, Laos completed accession procedures to become the 158th member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). We were in Bhutan for two workshops to support a renewed consideration of joining the WTO. We also had several training activities in Timor Leste with members of Parliament and across the government to support accession to the WTO in conjunction with plans to become part of ASEAN. Mongolia, the last WTO member to not have a free trade agreement (FTA), asked for training to complete an FTA with Japan. ASEAN itself was rapidly pursuing greater internal integration, with plans for the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) pushed forward from 2020 to 2015. It was also working on a range of agreements called ASEAN+1s with major powers in the region including Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. There was also a lot of activity to integrate Asia more closely to the rest of the world. The first meeting in what would become the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) took place in Singapore on the sidelines of APEC. The TPP, as regular Talking Trade readers will recall, rapidly expanded and finally concluded in 2014. The European Union was actively involved in working with members of ASEAN to create an eventual bloc-to-bloc agreement, starting with a bilateral FTA with Singapore.

The game of football is basically the same all over the world. Kids can learn the game in Morocco, Brazil, Laos or Germany secure in the knowledge that they might all one day compete together in the World Cup. They can sleep soundly at night because the rulebook is the same and because the referees that enforce the rules on the pitch do so in a broadly consistent manner. Both parts are important. If kids in various countries had the same rulebook, but enforcement varied by a lot in different places, it would not be possible to play the same game anymore. If what counted as a penalty was widely different in Morocco from Germany, or the total number of players allowed on the field was different in Laos from Brazil, the game would no longer be the same even if the “rulebook” were officially identical. We are about to find out what happens if the referees simply vanish from the pitch entirely. How long will players keep following the same rules before local variations of the game appear? Without a referee to maintain order, how will players behave in each match? How long will the global game continue at all? Before football fans panic, this problem is not actually found in football, but in the global trade arena. The referees are a much more obscure group of just seven individuals known as the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Today in Geneva, the referees were officially pulled off the trade pitch.

The Final ATC Talking Trade

Trade Without A Referee