Legal recognition for plurilateral agreements

A key question is how the WTO can make and legally adopt new trade rules more efficiently than it does now. Asked whether the WTO must adopt flexible approaches to legalize trade rules reached by "plurilateral" subsets of its members, 85% of respondents said they agreed, comprising 45% who strongly agreed and 39% who moderately agreed.

The WTO’s founding Marrakesh Agreement provides for the adoption of plurilateral agreements into a section known as its Annex 4. Since its inception in 1995, the WTO has not added a single plurilateral agreement to Annex 4.

A handful of members, usually including India, Indonesia, and South Africa, often blocks the entry into Annex 4 of any plurilateral agreement. Unable to attain consensus, such deals on new areas of trade slide back into gridlock and set back the WTO’s relevance. That is the limbo in which the plurilaterally-agreed WTO deals on e-commerce and investment facilitation now stand.

Classifying developed and developing countries

The WTO currently does not have a system to classify its members as developed or developing economies. Instead, it lets its members decide that for themselves. Two-thirds of WTO members say they are developing economies, including the world’s second-largest and fifth-largest economies China and India. Others include South Africa, Indonesia, Qatar, and Singapore. Some economies designate themselves developed in some aspects of WTO negotiations and developing in others.² Along with the "developing" status comes a slew of trade privileges known as "special and differential treatment." Sharp differences now exist over whether such special and differential treatment has become entrenched as an immutable privilege for WTO members that designate themselves developing countries for that organization’s purposes.

Asked if the WTO should develop a clear set of criteria to itself classify members as developed or developing, 51% of respondents strongly agreed that it should; 30% moderately agreed; 8% couldn’t decide; while 11% disagreed.

The survey provided a comment box for respondents. A full list of comments received from respondents is annexed to this report, along with the full set of survey results.

"Why do several large trading nations other than OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) member states, most notably Brazil, China, India and South Africa, continue to designate themselves as ‘developing countries’ in the WTO?" one respondent wrote. "Moving quickly to revoke such status would increase political pressure for the US to get fully engaged in the WTO reform process."

Effective decision-making with large and rising membership

When asked if the WTO’s decision-making process was effective at managing the varying interests of its increasing and diverse membership, 41% said it was not effective while 32% said it was somewhat ineffective. A combined 27% either couldn’t decide or said it was effective to some extent.

Dispute settlement system

One of the greatest problems that besets the WTO is the loss of its dispute settlement system. Frustrated on many fronts by the institution’s failure to move China to change its trade practices, among other issues, successive US administrations on a bipartisan basis have gutted the WTO’s dispute settlement system. The current Trump administration’s imposition of "reciprocal" tariffs, which unilaterally imposed unequal tariffs on different trading partners, upended whatever was left of American commitment to the multilateral trading system.

The retreat from global trade rules is doing irreparable harm to the international rules-based order. Interim arbitration arrangements at the WTO have not grown much in popularity, a sign of hesitation among WTO members to invest too much in the system.

Some 42% of survey respondents said paralysis in the WTO’s dispute settlement system has a high impact on the WTO’s effectiveness. Another 37% said the impact was "high-to-medium." The rest, a combined 21%, indicated the impact ranged from low to medium.