Plurilateral Trade Deals: An Alternative for Multilateral Trade Agreements?

Abstract

While multilateral trade negotiations under the World Trade Organization (WTO) continue to be in impasse, plurilateral trade negotiations – i.e. among a group of WTO members – have intensified in recent years, and also recorded a series of concrete results in liberalizing specific sectors of international trade. Hence, there is a widely shared view that plurilateral trade negotiations could be an alternative for the multilateral ones. This paper aims to answer the following questions: What are plurilateral trade agreements? Which are the reasons behind the surge in plurilateral negotiations in recent years? What are the main achievements in liberalizing trade at the plurilateral level? What are the advantages of plurilateral negotiations relative to multilateral ones, and why are they considered an attractive alternative for negotiations at the multilateral level?

Keywords

• plurilateral trade agreements
• the World Trade Organization (WTO)
• the Doha Round
• multilateral trade agreements
• trade liberalization