 Good morning and welcome to CSIS. This is a presentation of the Shoal Chair in International Business. I'm Scott Miller and I'm hold the Shoal Chair. Today's program is on regionalism in a globalized world. It's a presentation of the E15 initiative, which you'll hear more about in a minute. E15 is an expert-led multi-stakeholder forum convened by the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development and the World Economic Forum. We welcome you here to CSIS. We also welcome those who are viewing online. This program is being live webcast and will be available after the program ends at a permanent link at CSIS.org. Twenty years ago, the GATT completed the Uruguay Round Agreements Act. It was implemented in 1994. Over that 20-year period, there's been a major change in both technology and trade policy, which has radically lowered trade costs, which has been to the benefit of many consumers throughout the world. Those changes in both policy and technology led to the rise of what are commonly known as global value chains. Global value chains has created the ability to trade in tasks. The IT-enabled relationship between customers and suppliers has increased specialization. It's brought dramatic benefits to the trading system. It's brought benefits to consumers and producers around the world. At the same time, it's had two consequences. First, regional cooperation in the form of regional trade agreements has become the political path of least resistance. Now there are over 300 regional trade arrangements in place, which is about a 90% increase since 1994. The second consequence has been the lack of progress in the multilateral liberalization. Some of us in the private sector have thought long and hard about this and have wondered whether the GATT or the WTO is in fact an obsolete business model. It certainly has a couple of aspects which make it cumbersome. First, many of the rules and regulations of the GATT have as their business model a sense that there is essentially created to regulate arms link transactions between nonrelated parties. What the world of global value chains has created is a world where, according to UNCTAD, 80% of transactions are firm driven and under the firm control. So the notion of unrelated transactions or unrelated parties engaging in arms link transactions is somewhat outmoded. But secondly, the GATT has worked over the years with a notion of a single undertaking where agreements move in rounds where nothing's agreed till everything agreed. And that's worked in the past, but the world of global value change is a much more transactional world, a world where you solve the problems you can solve and you don't deal with the problems you can't solve. So it's led to a period of reflection about what to do about the multilateral process. Today we have three leaders of the E15 expert group on regional trading arrangements here to talk about the considerations that they have, their group has inquired about over the past 18 months and share their proposals and some of the analysis. Joining me here at CSIS are Antonio Estad de Voral, who's the manager of integration and trade sector at the Inter-American Development Bank, Miguel Rodriguez, senior associate of the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development, and Cathy Sumamong, adjunct fellow at CSIS, is your program, all leaders of the E15 working group on expert group on regional trading arrangements. With that, I'll turn the program over to Anthony. Thank you very much, Scott. Good morning to everybody. First, let me thank Scott, Paul and others here at the CSIS for helping us to put together this presentation here in DC. The way we want to do this presentation is I'll start with a very general overview of why we are worried about this topic and why the E15 took the RTA topic as one of the key initiatives, and Miguel will then explain a little bit more on the E15 initiative in particular, and Cathy will detail a little bit of our plans for following up on these projects. I also want to recognize that this particular project is done in conjunction, of course, with ICTSD, and also our friends who cannot be here from the Asian Development Bank Institute, who are also partners to this initiative. So what I'll do is very briefly to give you some kind of a stylized facts. Some of those already, Scott, have already pointed to that. Let's see how it works, these things. A couple of things I want to talk about. One is just to give you a sense on what has been in the last 15 years, maybe 20 years, the really drivers of global trade, and some of the shifting patterns that we have observed in the last 15 years. We have a very different type of structural patterns than what we have maybe 20 years ago. And in this context, what has been the role of the regional, the FTAs, what Scott was talking about in this global trade architecture. First, just to keep kind of a picture that I think is well known to some of you, is this amazing growth of trade and the weight of trade in the global economy. If you look at trade as a percentage of the global GDP, this is a percentage that have changed dramatically in the last, as it goes back to the 1950s, when trade was less than 10% of global GDP, today is around 25%. It's not only the growing importance of trade in the global economy, which has basically drive most of the recent expansion of our economic growth. You see also the power of the crisis. When you have a crisis in trade, how this drops changes the patterns of trade. This is, you see, the drop from 25% to 20%. When you look at this picture, there's an immediate question that comes to mind, is how much this trend will continue. Are we in a phase in which we have reached some sort of steady state, or this trend is something that will continue for the next decades to come? So this is just kind of a big picture that we have to have in mind when we talk about these issues. Part of this global expansion of trade has been due to the more and more participation of what we call the emerging and developing countries. The participation of these emerging and developing countries, the EDC countries, was less than 20% in the 1960s, 1970s, today's represents more than, almost 40%, depending on which countries you include, more than 40% of global trade. This is a completely change of who is trading in the global economy. And more and more this participation of the emerging and developing countries in global trade is because of South-South trade. It's actually trade among themselves. This what we call South-South trade was less than 5% in the 60s, in the 70s, today is close to 20%. So this is a completely change in the way that we look at this trade. And also, Scott was referring to another big crystallized fact that we have been, has been known as this growing importance of what we call global value change, which is basically the new ways in which manufacturing takes place around the world in most of the sectors, more and more even in the service area. This is a very interesting picture when you look at the global value change, looking at the linkage between multinationals and subsidiaries around the world. They are still very much centered around big industrialized countries. Sometimes we call it global value change, but in a way they are more regional value change. They are still very much focused in specific parts of the, as parts of the world. But this has changed completely the way we think about trade. And I think Scott was mentioning the fact that when you think about the trade rules, the trade rules are not any more rules to trade, but also rules to produce things because of this new structure of trade. So it changes completely the way we look at the trade issues. There are some numbers. This is some work that we are doing at the bank in terms of how we measure the importance of trade in a global value change. And I'll just look at the number for our region in Latin America, which is, as you know, a region that is not completely engaged in this type of fragmented global production. You look at these numbers. These numbers are different ways of looking at the participation of trade on this global value change. We have estimated that around 20% of Latin American exports are actually value added from other countries, so things that are imported into Latin America that then are used as inputs for final, for final production. The rest of it, the clear, kind of the clear bar, those are the percentage of exports of Latin American countries that will become inputs to other peoples, to other countries, to other partners' exports. This is what is called the upstream and downstream components. This, especially the upstream component, which is the one that kind of generates more value added for an economy, is very small in Latin America. It's almost double in Asia and, of course, much larger in Europe. But this is a change or pattern that we didn't see just 10, 15 years ago. And just very briefly, another, I think, big change that we have seen, at least in the last 15 years, is the importance, again, of natural resource trade. This has been driven most of the trade. In recent times, I'm not going to refer here much to that. Let's have another picture here. And I'm going to move to the other kind of stylized facts that we have been observing in the last 15, 20 years, which is how these new trade patterns are being regulated by a new global trade architecture. This is not any longer an architecture based on multilateral rules. More and more regional rules are becoming the way to do business in these aspects. This is the way that regional trade agreements, or FTAs, if you want, look in the 1970s, mostly Europeans doing their own thing in building their common market. And some action in Latin America. We were the first in our region to start thinking about these regional agreements as a way to promote trade in the region. If you look just in the mid-90s, right here, these things are start changing. This is, I think, it gives you a kind of the year in which things become completely moving into this RTA architecture. And if you look at what we have today, this is the picture of the number of the 300-something agreements that this is how it looks like when you look it in the map, which is, you know, becomes pretty, pretty visual. In black is what is already as agreements that are already in place. In red are the ones that are being negotiated as we speak and that will become probably full-fledged agreements in the next five, 10 years. So this is basically the rules that are in place and the interest of the 15 in looking at this closely. How does this type of agreements represent in global trade? There's lots of estimates. It's actually very difficult to estimate how much trade is done under an RTA for several reasons. Some of them technical. How much use you made of rules of origin, for example. We don't know exactly. This is the lower estimates that are around 40%. Some people estimate that almost 60% of global trade is done under a preferential trade agreement. So it's between 40% and 60% trade is regulated by these regional agreements. And the last couple of slides that I have is also show you, and this line represents this 1995 kind of inflection point. It looks like a different types of, different types of agreements. This looks at one of the dimensions, which is what we call shallow or deep agreements. You know, between 95 there were very simple agreements, mostly dealing with basic market access feature. After 95, more and more agreements are having these more complex clauses into that agreements, going from investment and services and so on. So it changes completely the type of agreements that we have pre and before and after the mid-90s. And also another way to look at these changes is if you look at the partners, let me just put the whole thing together, which is looking at who are the partners in regional trade agreements. Most of the new agreements that are coming into place in both southern countries, developing countries, with northern countries or actually south-south agreements as the key. And just to finalise, give you some thoughts that Miguel and Cathy will develop. This is still an unfinished architecture. Scott was mentioning the role of, and Miguel will talk about this, the role of the multilateral system in this particular issues. But if you look at just only the way we have this architecture on RTAs, this is still an unfinished architecture. This is still lots of things that can be completed under those rules. The first, notice that there are still very big missing links in this map that you just saw. The big kind of north-north counties are not connected yet. That's where the U.S. and the U. and Japan are just now talking. And also there are other big missing links, especially the BRICs, the kind of the big southern developing countries, Brazil, the Indies, the Chinas are not yet linked into this picture. So that's one of the big missing links. It looks like everybody's wire, not so. Still the big players are not yet into that picture. And second, there's a lot of issues related to what we call how you actually manage this spaghetti wall. And there's still groups of countries that start doing that. It's what we call conversions in a much more graphic way. We call it converting the spaghetti into lasagnas just to get less complex agreements among countries in a single agreement. And there are very interesting examples of that in the world today. So this is kind of what the war is us. And this is what the multilateral system is going to be confronting. These emergence of big matter regionals in which big southern or northern countries are participating. And big experiments, big pilot experiments on convergence. And one of the things that one of the kind of the best examples that we have is actually in our region, the Pacific Alliance is trying this type of mechanism in a very practical way. So with this, I'll stop and I'll go, I'll give the floor to Miguel and to Betty. Thank you, Scott. Thank you. Thank you very much. Tony, thank you, Scott, for this, for organizing this event today. I don't have any PowerPoint. So I'm going to focus on basically three issues. I'm going to talk a little bit about the E-15 initiative and as Scott mentioned before, we are what we are doing in terms of regional agreements and trying to look into the impact of regional agreements in the multilateral trading system we are doing in the context of the E-15 initiative. So I will refer briefly to the, to this initiative. I will then talk a little bit about the relationship between these figures that Tony presented to us, the relationship between regional agreements and the WTO, multilateral trade system. And then I will also say a few words about mega regionals. I'm sorry. Okay. I will, I will say a few, a few words about mega regionals and how these mega regionals may somehow complicate the figure and particularly the, complicate the options open to the WTO and to the multilateral trading system to continue playing the role it has. They have played so far. So on the E-15 initiative, let me simply say that for the last two and a half years, ICTSD, which is the International Center on Trade and Sustainable Development, where I work, has engaged with a number of international institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Trade Institute, and others, and a number of individuals as well. We have engaged in an effort in a process of dialogue and exchanges of view on the WTO, the multilateral trade system, and particularly the changes in the multilateral trade system phases in a world of increase, increasing number of regional agreements and, you know, given the complexities as well of the world economy. So we have initiated this process and the WTO is at the center of our preoccupations. Why? Because we care about the WTO. And we care about the WTO because we consider that it is an important construction that is helping significantly developing countries to integrate better into the world economy. We at ICTSD work normally at, you know, activities across the intersection between trade and sustainable development. And in that sense, for us, the WTO is a key institution of the global economy. It's a legal framework that helps countries to manage their trade relations in the context of the framework of rules. And it also provides for the resolution of trade disputes by a mechanism that so far has proved to be very effective. So we care about the WTO and that's why we decided to focus on the WTO and to try to see what is going on and what can be done to continue strengthening the system. So that process that we are undertaking together with these institutions and partners, we call it the E-15 initiative. And so far we have dealt with issues like the importance of global value change that Tony mentioned. And we are trying to identify how the WTO can deal appropriately with this, say, new phenomenon. WTO, you know, in its analysis and in the negotiations that are going on, global value change are not part of the picture. So this is an area where we think we need to do some work. We have been looking at the issue of food security. We have looked at the issue of the regional agreement, the proliferation of regional agreements and the relationship with the WTO. And we are also focusing a lot on the functioning of the WTO as an institution. And in this context we are, say, looking at ways to enhance the participation of the private sector in WTO activities. And so on. I don't want to spend my intervention talking about the issues we have been discussing, but we have looked at issues like innovation, climate change, competition policy, et cetera, et cetera. And if you are interested in our work, you may want to look at our website where you will find a lot of information on this and it is www.e15initiative.org. As Toni mentioned, and as we'll be discussing in the course of this workshop, one of the key issues we have been looking at in the context of the E15 initiative is the question of regional agreements, the impact of regional agreements on the multilateral trading system, the relationship between this agreement and the ongoing negotiations. And we came out, because that's the whole purpose, we came out with some proposals and with some ideas that we'll be discussing later on. One of these ideas is the establishment of what we call the RTA exchange, which is a mechanism to look to focus specifically on what's going on in the area of regional trade agreements, bilateral free trade areas, bilateral free trade areas, bilateral negotiations, regional pact, etc, etc. And Katie will focus on that, so I'm not going to talk a lot about that, but simply to say that this is a proposal that has come out of this E15 process, that we are in the present, implementing it and we are doing it together with the Inter-American Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank Institute. So that's what I wanted to say about the E15 initiative, maybe after our presentations and in the questions and answers I can address this issue if you're interested in. But let me look at the work of the E15 and regional agreements specifically and let me provide you with sort of a rationale as to why we are focusing a lot on that and we have a group specifically dealing with regional agreements. Our work is based on a number of premises. First, the world of preferential trade agreements has drastically changed. You saw that, you saw those changes in Tony's presentation, but I just let me simply say that during the first wave of regional agreement we had mainly the bilateral pact, with some exceptions like NAFTA, but essentially most of the agreements negotiated so far, like the U.S. and Korea or the U.S. Peru or the U.S. Colombia, etc, have been bilateral free trade negotiations, bilateral pacts. Most of the agreements nowadays we are facing a different situation in the new wave of RTAs, but we are seeing, witnessing is a number of negotiations on what we call mega-regional agreements, which are designed to foster conversions among existing RTAs in some cases and involve countries representing a large share of global trade, GDP, and population. So first, say premise, you know, we are in a different world as far as RTAs are concerned. Second, the WTO is being buy-sided by disagreements. Disagreements are being negotiated outside of the WTO, but by WTO members. And as a result of that, the rule making in trade that has been so far the prerogative of the WTO has been conducted elsewhere. By WTO members, which is leading to the creation of a dual system somehow, or a multiple system, in any case a fragmented international trade system. This will be exacerbated, of course, by the negotiation of these mega-regional agreements, because of, as I mentioned, because of the sheer size in all respects of the countries participating in these agreements, the impact of the WTO will be felt more significantly. But also the fact that these rules are negotiating outside of the WTO means that there is a new rule creation on issues that are not dealt with by the WTO, or that are dealt poorly by the WTO at present. So that increases, of course, the fragmentation of the system. Third, we believe that the WTO rules on regional trade agreements need to be updated. As you know, we have article 24 in the old guide that was inherited by the WTO. We have some amendments introduced in the 1990s, but essentially these rules, what they tell you is that regional agreements, bilateral agreements, free trade areas, should conform to the WTO. They should be responsive to what WTO rules provide for. And I think that nowadays this is quite insufficient, because first, as we'll see, regional agreements and regional rules are not necessarily conforming to the WTO. They are going beyond the WTO. And also, we cannot continue thinking of regional facts as facts that need to follow WTO rules. There may be ways, and there may be occasions and possibilities for the WTO also to follow regional facts in the sense that rules developed originally may be used eventually by the WTO to adjourn in a way itself in the future. So, and this is the last premise. I think we need a new relationship between the WTO and regional facts. A relationship that is that it could be that could be mutually reinforcing. As I said, in many instances the WTO may have a lot to learn from negotiations going on in bilaterally or in the mega regionals. And on the other hand, these negotiations need to be also aware that in many instances there are rules and policies and disciplines developed by the WTO that may be used regionally. So, these are the premises on which we work with regard to regionals. And all these, say, points, all these considerations play an even more important role when we look at mega regionals. So, let me just mention a few words about these mega regional negotiations. When we refer to mega regionals, we usually have two trade negotiations in mind. The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement negotiations and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. There may be others in Asia particularly, but these are the two key negotiations as far as mega regionals are concerned. They are not facts yet. They are negotiations. They are going on. They expect to be completed by the end of the year, but they are still going on. And the TPP that was supposed to be completed a couple of years back, indeed still going on, the negotiations on the TPP. And the TTIPE, the U.S., EU trade negotiations are supposed to be completed by the end of 2014. So, the negotiations as almost all trade negotiations are conducted in secrecy. So, we don't know really, you know, what will result of the negotiations, because we don't know the result of the negotiations. But we know, however, two very important things. We know the economic significance of the participating countries, of the countries participating in these negotiations, and we know the subjects that are being negotiated. And simply speaking, the more important economically speaking, the partners to the TPP and the TTIPE, the more potentially significant could be the impact on the ongoing negotiations, the WTO negotiations, and the multilateral trading system. And by the same token, the wider the subjects and the negotiations by, say, including a number of WTO plus issues or issues not currently within the WTO framework, then, well, the more complex the result of the negotiations will be for the WTO. Regarding the economic weight of mega-regionals, as I mentioned, both the TPP, the TTP, no, sorry, the TPP and the TTIP involve countries representing a large share of the world's population, economic activity, and trade. Let's say, in the case of the TPP, they include some 40 percent of the total world population. They are responsible. The countries negotiating the TPP, they are responsible for some 60 percent of global GDP, and trade among them, actually, nowadays, is more than or was more than two trillion U.S. dollars in 2012. On the TTIP side, which, as you know, involved the 28 EU, European Union member countries, plus the U.S., well, that relationship is the world's largest economic relationship with reciprocal trade amounting to nearly one trillion dollars in 2012. Now, what will be the consequences, the economic consequences of these negotiations? Well, there will be many, and as I said, we don't know exactly the real impact of the negotiations until they are completed, but we know that almost by definition, they will have an impact on trade preferences, because as these negotiations aim at eliminating tariff and non-tariff barriers among the participating countries, and given that many of these countries are among the most important preference granting countries, then the countries receiving trade preferences from these countries will suffer, and there will be probably some trade deviation as well, but again, this is difficult to quantify nowadays. Nevertheless, what I've seen from the different analysis is that the impact, the economic impact on, say, poor countries from these negotiations is not going to be that significant, and if you look at the previous negotiations, you will see that that economic impact tends to be overemphasized by some people and under-emphasized by others, but they are not really significant. However, they will be very significant in the regulatory area. As I said, these two set of negotiations aim at developing rules in areas that are not dealt with by the WTO, or areas that are dealt with insufficiently by the WTO. Depending on what they do, so we'll end up with a very fragmented multilateral or international trade system with countries such as the TPP and TTIP countries, which are very large, the U.S., the European Union, and others in Japan, with countries with a set of rules that will not apply to the WTO members because these rules to be applied by WTO members need to be incorporated into the WTO by negotiations at some point. So we are facing a very serious situation and the dynamics of these negotiations and the fact that the Doha negotiations are deadlock, of course, is creating a lot of tension and suspicion between the TPP and the TTIP countries and the non-participating countries in these negotiations. And that's one of the reasons why we are placing a lot of emphasis in the work of the E15 on regional agreements. We can continue talking about this for the rest of the morning, but I'm going to stop here and maybe, you know, at the end of the discussion, we can come back to some of these issues. But I just wanted to convey to you that the reason why we are looking into regional agreements and their relationship with the multilateral trade system is not because of an intellectual choice of sorts, but because we are really facing a very challenging situation from the point of view of the WTO and the multilateral trading system. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks very much and thank you, Scott, for having us. I was the theme leader of the RTA group thanks to Tony and Miguel's invitation and wanted to highlight some key findings that came out of that group of the E15 initiative and perhaps highlight one particular policy idea that has now kind of gelled from that group. Thank you. Great. Technology. Great. Let me... The... What we started with was the kind of frustration in this group. We had 25 key experts from around the world, terrific people, minister-level people included, and we had the kind of frustration that the debate and discussion on RTAs had been stuck for so long in talking about whether RTAs are trade-creating, whether they are trade diverting, do they comply with Article 24. It was this kind of seesaw debate that had been going on for 10 years and we went in and we said let's change this, let's do something a little bit different, let's look at how we can actually leverage regional trade agreements, given that the horse is kind of out of the barn, we already have so many RTAs that as Tony highlighted and ever more RTAs every day. So that was our starting point and we kind of thought that RTAs are here to stay and the efforts to regulate somehow to standardize or multilaterally force RTAs into a certain mold have been unsuccessful partly because all the WTO members have formed their RTAs and all of them are reluctant to have their RTAs looked at or analyzed by others and in a way we felt that we're looking at a false problem, that there is not a necessarily a problem to begin with, empirically most RTAs are trade-creating, most RTAs particularly driven by the advanced economies are kind of WTO plus and we just felt that why fix what works, RTAs have created a lot of trade, they have helped developing countries apply new trade disciplines, open their markets, liberalize when the multilateral trading system has been stuck. So in many ways we were kind of pro RTAs in our group and wanting to see then how we can leverage this enormous system of array of agreements and liberalization that has been taken place in the past 20 years and in particular to see how to kind of converge as Tony mentioned these RTAs into something more coherent, something more looking like the WTO, perhaps you know pursue the WTO's mission to open trade for the benefit of all as the mission is, how to multilateralize some of the best practices from RTAs, there are a lot of RTA kind of families, a lot of best practices that have been proliferating from one RTA group to the next and how could we somehow elevate these to the multilateral level and allow more countries to access these benefits and how can we deepen RTAs for trade and development in a lot of developing regions, Africa and so on there are still challenges in terms of implementing RTAs in terms of applying rules in terms of understanding the latest and greatest innovations and best practices in in trade agreements and finally something that Miguel referred to is how to kind of enhance this public-private dialogue on RTAs, what works oftentimes there seem to be gaps even among sophisticated folks, even in this town on what works on the ground in RTAs, in applying RTAs and kind of what goes on at the policy levels, so those were kind of our aims in this particular group and these are of course wonderful goals how to converge and multilateralize RTAs and we had three particular policy recommendations, so let me just highlight the two first ones that we had from this group and then focus on the third one for most of the time, one was a kind of a multilateralism impact assessments, oftentimes RTAs have been analyzed by kind of static trade effects and you know then we have been kind of arguing have RTAs been trade creating or trade diverting and the idea here was to look at kind of ex ante and exposed analytics on RTAs, look at the dynamic effects, spillovers and sort of broader impact assessments if you will, the second idea that was floating that was actually very robust and all of these ideas are catalogued in ICTSD working papers was a code of conduct on plurilateral agreements, there's a lot of appetite and enthusiasm among the WTO members for for or select groups there are in subgroups in forming plurilateral agreements somehow taking some tested and tried RTA rules and elevating them to the multilateral level through plurilatorals and we felt that this can be a very unruly process unless there's some kind of a coherent code of conduct to guide that process. The third idea that actually came from a working paper I did and then the group sees on it and seemed like the timing was right was for a new institution and so let me put this up there what we what we find is that there's an enormous array as Tony showed of RTAs rules analytics lessons learned a whole lot of expertise here all around the world there are people who have negotiated RTAs have implemented them there's a tremendous amount of kind of intangible knowledge as well as real knowledge out there data sets analytics just databases if you start thinking about it IDB has its database on RTAs so does the ADB so does the WTO well bank OECD oftentimes these overlap and there is kind of duplication there's a great deal of enthusiasm to understand and look at RTAs in the in the policy communities and analytical communities but this information and expertise whether tangible or intangible is dispersed it's fragmented it's all over the place it's like the RTA system itself there is not one single body that has kind of brought it all together just like the WTO brings all the WTO agreements together in one place all the analytics that has not been the case with RTAs so we felt that we need some kind of a systematic way of pooling this data curating all the knowledge information that has been done on RTAs and sort of drawing the kind of crowdsourcing global drawing the global wisdom of the crowds on on regional trade agreements given that there is a lot of value left on the table a lot of lot of knowledge that an expertise that has yet to be tapped for instance Latin American negotiators in Chile and Mexico have been very seasoned 20 years been negotiating implementing trade agreements shouldn't they have something to tell to negotiators say in Africa or other regions and these kind of knowledge is is kind of left there on the table and oftentimes it's even for sophisticated analysts is it's difficult to find the knowledge that has been codified you know databases different analytics to go on Google search and it's an it's an arduous process to find the right information so that kind of motivated us to focus on this idea of RTA exchange and the what what this thing is is there we go um so this is the kind of a first ever platform global clearinghouse on regional trade agreements that brings together it's kind of the Google of RTAs organizes the world's information on RTAs brings it together brings together also ideas and expertise on RTA so it's not only about curating it's about actually promoting debate and new ideas for multiple audiences for policymakers academics uh private sector and some of the means of engagement that we um we have kind of converged on bit by bit and this is evolving working progress is a clearinghouse an RTA exchange org with kind of analytically organized multi-source real-time information and data ideas on RTAs really a platform to pull information and this would also contain a community community of users all of you could log in build your own profile have kind of use a generated ideas there then we were talking with Tony and Miguel about policy dialogues both virtual and kind of a real real-life face-to-face as well as eventually perhaps capacity building workshops webinars peer-to-peer learning that one can one can do at scale through this kind of through these kinds of platforms and again this is run by the consortium of partners so we announced this in Bali in December and the sponsors are IDB, ICTSD and Asian Development Bank Institute so give you a flavor I would love to put up some screenshots of what the dot org looks like I'm actually building it as we speak but our sponsors I've yet to see it so I hesitate to do that just to give you a little bit of flavor what goes in there are kind of pooling from around the world datasets analytics on regional trade agreements so we have already pulled together all different databases around the world on trade agreements we have put together the research from many think tanks including CSIS, Peterson Institute Brookings on RTAs there is going to be news and opinion there events and seminars on RTAs from around the world perhaps capacity building and training modules that are created by universities and others and could be created there's a community social networking aspect to this a blog kind of pushed the frontier in a very systematic fashion RTA ideas and then this this lends itself to conducting sort of brief informal surveys snapshots but particularly with business audiences probably is a very very good venue to do that so how does this compare what's the competitive landscape well if you compare this to a Google search or a sort of bilateral start org that many of you are familiar with the idea here is to go beyond that organize the information in more analytical fashion more visual fashion more appealing fashion and systematically kind of promote the idea generation and kind of if I might write ideas push the right ideas fresh ideas on RTAs connect the stakeholders and customize have capacities to customize the information by users so this is really a sort of a need snazzy social platform applied to a new space a policy space and compared to sort of policy and academic efforts that have been taken place and a lot of us have been partied with those over the past several years this is kind of a way to pull pull together everything it's all you need to know on RTAs that's the idea and it is source agnostic so it's not you know one think tank or one institution over the other it's all the information that there is of course with some quality controls and it's real time and the idea is that that is truly kind of bottom up venue for changing exchanging information analytics on RTAs and that is it is sustained so it's not just you know one shot event with one conference and then everybody goes home but it's actually going to be there for for for a good while and it is a political and has a kind of this global public good aspect to it or or characteristics so what are the benefits we think this may have multiple benefits if it's appropriately done and run and paired with a real policy dialogues bringing people face to face there's nothing there's a great deal of value to that as well so this is kind of a dot or it doesn't obviate obviate policy dialogue and that's definitely part of this so the benefits of something like this a concerted way pulling together the information and generating new ideas is to enhance RTAs transparency there's really a lot of complaints and problems related to this there's a lot of feeling particularly in Geneva that RTAs are not transparent and negotiating in secret or the rules are not clear to outsiders and so forth it offers shortcuts to policymakers negotiators perhaps in developing countries with very limited capacity is to access the right information in a fast way and obviates these endless Google searches on RTAs and perhaps avert recreating the wheel you know perhaps we don't need all you know 20 different databases on RTAs there's a lot of overlap and bringing them together and giving the user guidance on where to go to find what is kind of one step in that direction and hopefully you know will facilitate some lessons learned transfer of lessons learned and tap this intangible knowledge that's floating around there on how to negotiate RTAs implement them converge them and so forth and you know hopefully will unearth some policy innovations as well and help them go viral through a network effect so to finish we kind of conceptualize this is a makeover of sorts of RTAs and RTA system so before we have very dispersed information expertise has been rather untapped in certain ways it has been maybe anecdotal top-down these may be a little crude characterizations but these have been the typical approaches you know it's sort of narrow academic efforts narrow policy efforts perhaps private public sectors not talking to one another and so forth and has been more conceptual also in nature and the after after our makeover we hope to see the RTA system being thought about and acted upon through kind of centralized information that there's peer-to-peer learning that is an analytical and very systematic and very purposeful drive to induce convergence induce sort of WTO RTA coherence as well as to multilateralize RTAs and to arrive at something very actionable very practical and actionable policy ideas and business practices also around RTAs so those were some of our ideas and where Tonya and Miguel can also chime in on this but we're building this org right now and we're also hoping to then move to policy dialogues and really operationalize this so thanks very much Thank you Dati and my compliments to the E15 group for really creative thinking about how to move forward I wanted to observe that having somebody who's been part of these conversations for the last 15 years or so I'm very pleased to see the conversation about regional trade agreements move from what I would characterize 15 years ago it was a combination of suspicion and disdain but there's lots of comments that regional trade arrangements in Geneva were viewed like I view crabgrass in my front yard you know it's one of those things you'd rather not have and what I've seen is this and particularly in today's presentation I want to recognize the progress the distance you have to come from suspicion to mutual reinforcement because I think the trading system deserves the mutual reinforcement of RTAs with the multilateral system I think that's what's in the interest of traders so I'm very pleased to see those recommendations let me ask the first question before I turn it to the audience which is based on that progress that you've made if there is going to be mutual reinforcement of RTAs with the multilateral system that would imply a degree of specialization and I just wanted to ask the panelists whether you think there are things that are best done in RTAs that the multilateral system ought to not focus so much energy on for instance industrial goods market access as an example but just curious to what you think just give one example I have in mind I'm sure that Miguel and Cathy have others and I think you put it in the right framework Scott this is about mutual reinforcement this is you know changing the chip about how we think about these RTAs from a system that used to discipline RTAs to a system that more arbitrate in a way the this growing number of RTAs but this just has to give you an example a very recent one and there are many I think of those for example on the trade facilitation agreement there's a lots of things that are today's in the trade facilitation agreement that probably will be much better done or will be helped through the RTA and it will probably go beyond actually in the TF agreement so there's ways in which the RTAs can help the WTO in the implementation and in their own agreements and I see the trade facilitation as a good example and then also you can look at examples in which the WTO should also be able to help issues that are dealt in the RTAs like for example the issues of how to do how to link up exercise in conversions on rules of origin for example in things that are done in one side of the wall that could also bring this type of experience in other sides of the wall well in principle I see a lot of complementarities between what is done is being done in regional agreements and what the WTO can do in all areas the problem is that we are now facing a situation which is the following we are making progress on bilateral rules on bilateral facts trade facts mega-regionals but we are not making progress in WTO because the Doha negotiations are in deadlock for the last few years and I think that that's the real problem I mean the problem is not to negotiate bilateral agreements the problem is that the WTO has stopped from developing on one of its major objectives which is rulemaking in the trade area and trade negotiations trade liberalization and yes there is a lot of complementarity and I believe that many of the rules developed in the say for instance in the mega-regionals you know they to contrary to other negotiations they are focusing on what we now call regulatory coherence so they are looking at issues that are dealt with nationally they are trying to to modify the way countries cooperate in areas such as competition policy SPS regulations sanitary and phytosanitary regulations technical barriers to trade and they as a result of that they have to deal with the way they deal with these issues nationally so they are probably you know coming to an agreement on how to do that in this small group of countries that you know approach should be brought into the WTO at some point but for this to happen the WTO needs to be forward-looking and not you know not keep itself stuck in these in these long negotiations so they don't have around yeah some of the ideas well in a way you know RTA is allowed for customizing the rules by the parties so so that's definitely a benefit but like Miguel said I think in the mega-regionals in particular what we're seeing is kind of pushing the envelope on new trade rules this has been the function of RTAs for years they've been always out in the front lines in making international trade legislation essentially and now what we're seeing is kind of new rules on IP around digital trade we're seeing e-commerce new disciplines emerging probably from TTIP and TBV things like state-owned enterprises all of you know well currency manipulation all these kinds of new rules and in a way you know it's not necessarily better done in RTAs it's probably easier to do there and easier to kind of get these rules going and then take them to the WTO as Miguel said and somehow pluralize those even amongst sort of the groups of the willing and take it from there and allow for other countries to exceed when they can and perhaps this might be a new way for the WTO to function rather than the single undertaking Thank you let me now turn to the audience for questions there are three rules for questions first wait for the microphone we have an online audience and and it'll arrive soon second introduce yourself and your organization and third I call the Alex Turrec rule make sure your question is in the formal question so yes Barbara Bowie Whitman and I'm an independent consultant now but I worked for a long time on negotiations of agreements in the Americas and obviously what we have in in all of these proliferating agreements and what no matter how they overlap is that they are coalitions of the willing it's fascinating to me to think that in the days when we were trying to do an agreement among all the Americas we foundered on how you resolve some major issues and whether it would be best done in the WTO or in the Americas and it was resolved nowhere yet but there are several theoretical questions and one small practical one that come about with this the small practical one I'll pose first and that is when I see Katie's proposal for bringing FTAs or RTAs together what there's there's a noticeable organization that's not mentioned and one of our speakers we used to be closely associated with them and that is the OAS trade unit and the trade information network that has been sponsored by the OAS is that sort of subsumed under the IDB or is it no longer considered important and then the the bigger question which maybe we don't need to address but I'm going to put it on the table anyway I've always felt that in having a long career in multilateral work whether it was diplomatic or or trade you always solve problems in smaller groups you can't always solve them at the table whether it's a working group that goes aside and comes up on something and then tries to sell it to the bigger picture or whether it's a trade agreement among those who are ready to do it today because the others aren't ready to do it until day after tomorrow or with a 40-year exclusion for certain products so the point is do we have operational space anymore in this hemisphere or does everything refer back to the WTO at some point because the big issues might get solved that we had hoped since we couldn't solve certain issues with Europe that and we didn't want to solve them with certain groups of developing countries locally if locally is the Americas we had to wait till the WTO cross that threshold and then come back to the hemisphere things have moved in a different direction we're now having more and more regional groups and a concept of maybe the US and Europe work things out on a regional basis so where do we stand in terms of the big region right here and the WTO in terms of where some of these major issues may eventually be resolved Tony probably has more to say about what's going on in the Americas and my hope is that given the integration that we have attained at the in Latin America and Caribbean and in the Americas per se and now you know tea tip going on that perhaps there is a way maybe there there is an opportunity here to build something bigger transatlantic with with the entire Americas and with the with Europe given that so many countries in Latin America have agreements with the EU and you know also TPP countries incidentally have a lot of agreements with the EU so there is at least this might kind of find the sky a dream to have some kind of convergence is an eventually of all these agreements under some some kind of an umbrella perhaps arrive at multi-lateral trade through that backdoor backdoor channel we love the OAS I forgot to mention the OAS we're not subsuming anybody we're basically seeking to link so OAS is one of the links to our site and everybody gets their due credit and nobody's information is kind of stolen or taken we're just pulling everything together for for the world to see what what different contributions have been made by different institutions and always has made tremendous tremendous contributions in putting together databases on RTAs and information and its first rate system so so my apologies for that but Tony if you want to follow up on the kind of saturation of Americas with RTAs yeah just maybe just a short comment this will take us probably no afternoon but let me just maybe just give a kind of a short short response to your to your answer bringing one of the kind of the most interesting examples and initiatives that we have today in the region which is the emerging of this Pacific Alliance project right which you have to see it not just only as a new initiative among four countries that want to integrate better but really as a change of the dynamics of the way that regional initiatives have been put together in the in the region and in particular in relation with other partners and here I just want to make two points one when you look at the Pacific Alliance you have two countries in the Pacific Alliance that have never been interested in this regional traditional blocks in our region Mexico that besides NAFTA has never been engaged in a major block in our region where there's the Indian community and so on and Chile which you know for a small period was part of the Indian community it has an associated status with Mercosur but it really has always been a country that has played by by their own in terms of their bilateral relations so you have you see here for now a region in which two major important countries Mexico and Chile bringing together a new kind of dynamics to the to the way that traditionally we have done regional integration our region and the second the second idea here is that it's done in a very different way that has been done in the past this is the first time that Latin America is straight to build a block without looking at the customs union model okay which is which as we know this is probably the most complicated way of doing this type of business uh in Latin America we have done it for for many many for many for different reasons and we know how complicated it is it was very complicated in Europe it is very it has been very complicated here and of course if you have Mexico and this is probably the third point you have Mexico Chile Peru and Colombia and maybe after you know this year maybe Costa Rica and it changes completely the weight you know with the big partner in the region which is Brazil this is a completely different way in which Brazil will have to play down the road their own relations with the rest of the the region so this is I think it's a game changer what we have seen in the in the region and maybe the fourth thing is the what Cathy was mentioning those are countries that are very well linked already with the major industrial markets both I mean four of them all of them have FTAs with the European Union with the United States with Canada with Japan and three of them are part of the TPP so you know what's going to happen in the next couple of years four years I don't know but it's it's definitely something different it's it's a different dynamics what we have today in the region very good point thank you another question yes sir hi mama topper from the world bank I work on southern Africa and I found it very interesting when you talked about peer-to-peer exchanges learning from different RTAs and I'm saying this not only to learn what is happening but also we know key problem is that many of these RTAs are not actually being implemented so it's all kinds of issues of implementation and we're working with five countries in southern Africa who want to accelerate the implementation of reforms they've long committed to over the last couple of years it's called the accelerated program for economic integration so my question is can this tool or website not also be used to have peer-to-peer exchanges between practitioners on how to implement and you mentioned Tony trade facilitation I think that's probably a specific issue and could then this website not also help in making compliance with W2O rules much more consistent over time thank you Tony and Miguel feel free to chime in the this is kind of a demand-driven effort at its heart and bottom up so I think it very much lends itself to things like this to peer-to-peer learning somebody still has to do it somebody still has to resource it and so forth but if we have a platform that it brings together people we can systematically do some of that we can spontaneously do some of that as well it can emerge from from bottom up and if you have African countries that need a certain specific expertise they can reach out through the network and access that and find the right players who can help them right away but we can also do something you know this is you know up to us to figure out with partners like you on how to systematically push some key initiatives and pilot projects and perhaps test it and this is a wonderful you know could be a wonderful case case to do that and the same with the W2O rules it's it's you know the platform could be a kind of a just a platform that curates information and publishes some blogs and ideas here and there but it can also be used very strategically for for given initiatives and Miguel in particular ICTSD is is very very close to the W2O system and is is working hard on this already briefly I would add to what Katia said that this RTA change as a as a mechanism to provide information advice and share different experiences will be most useful for developing countries for small developing countries because they are the ones who are excluded from these negotiations they are they don't participate in the TPP they don't participate in the TIP they are excluded so that they are the ones who really need information they are the ones who really need to know what is going on in these negotiations what is the impact of these agreements on their own economies so in fact we as as we said before we are working on this with the Asian Development Bank Institute but we're trying to get also together and to get involved the the african institutions why because it's important they are the ones who are really working together with and the World Bank as well of course I participated in a meeting of the african group two weeks ago and I could see how important for them is to know what is going on and they are the one who have the least information so yes definitely this could be you know a tool for negotiators from Africa yeah and maybe just that one thing another word to what you just said it's not only about implementation but it's also about utilization of the RTA so this is just about design which maybe was the focus here it's issues about implementation as you said and issues of utilization and when you talk about utilization you have to bring the private sector here it's it's especially the small and medium enterprises that know the trade and how to use some of these agreements you know we have a wonderful set of agreements sometimes are not just they are not used sir you have a question found around yes sir my name is Zoran Yolevsky I am ambassador of most united states and I have two questions one is more broad and broad and more general in first 50 years of multilateral trading system during the god time we had eight rounds of negotiations and I was a young diplomat in my first decade of work when the last round so where I haven't finished and now we have more than 20 years and I'm getting close to be senior or retired diplomat in the next 10 years and we don't have any movement in that respect and those regional trade agreements this is out probably of that process and I would like to have your view of the possibility of moving forward the doh around of multilateral trade negotiations and second I would like to applaud for your initiative and as Scott mentioned this initiative is reinforcing multilateral regional trade agreements within the multilateral trading system and that's that's important that's reality the tip is almost 50 percent of the world GDP when they will be negotiated so we need to have the reality in the consideration and I know that ICC is part of WTO that group but I haven't seen that WTO is involved in this process do you see some involvement of WTO secretariat and how how this group will be organized how you plan to do the next steps because it's a very important process okay yeah well uh well first you know ICC is not part of the WTO but our work focuses a lot on WTO issues and and we look at it from the point of view of developing countries basically we because we consider that the WTO is important particularly for developing not only for developing countries but particularly for developing countries now the WTO is of course in a in a difficult and a critical juncture because all this is going on outside of the WTO all these agreements are moving on and the WTO is talking the Doha negotiations um well what is going to happen we it's difficult to to see what is going to happen but we know that if that situation continues the the and the Doha negotiations are not completed then the WTO will be unable to take up new initiative it's going to be extremely difficult to think of we say the WTO looking at new issues say like those I mentioned before on regulatory coherence and and others while the negotiations are going on so I think that the the priority now for the WTO say members is to complete the negotiations and then start looking forward then seeing how to accommodate these different agreements now I wouldn't be that say negative with the WTO because of the Doha in fact we have a multilateral trading system you know since 1946 47 and it has evolved and what we have now is it's a construction that is been working well in several areas particularly in the area of dispute settlement which is you know you cannot compare what they are doing now there with what other institutions are doing and but it's still you know it's it needs to move forward and that's the problem at the WTO but I'm sure that you know after Bali and what is going on with discussions that are going on they should be able to to move ahead I think we have time for one more question yes sir thank you Scott my name is Izzy Siddiqui CSIS Miguel I have a question for you your comment about fragmentation of international trading system with regard to RTAs my question is is the chicken or the egg situation with WTO if there was action going on in Geneva maybe there would not be that many RTAs or even mega RTAs because that's that's one of the issue I see so my question to you is this how do you change that dynamics in Geneva especially when many of the countries still are trying to stick to the old texts like the Rev 4 or the Dhamma texts the economic reality on the ground is different than it was in 2001 when the Doha mandate was announced so question is how do we get that turned around so you can make more progress in Geneva so it will be a more robust multi-lethal trading system and not these spectacles yes well that's that's difficult I mean and that's the the dilemma that WTO members now face how to move ahead there is almost a consensus opinion that the the the the launch of these regional negotiations accelerated after the failure of the WTO in 2008 to complete Doha package that may be true if that's the case the reverse may also be true so you need to complete it so to kind of we are not going to stop the negotiation of RTAs that's going to happen anyway but if we can complete the negotiations then you can really pay attention to what is going on outside of the WTO and try to somehow incorporate the the some of the rules and disciplines that have been developed in RTAs into the WTO system how to do that well I think that the responsibility and the possibility here lie in the developing countries I think that developing countries should take a more proactive and constructive approach to the negotiations because it is in their own interest to strengthen the multilateral trading system and the WTO many of them most of them are outside of the big negotiations so for them to kind of try to to revert this situation is by you know helping to complete the negotiations and then move forward maybe just one short comment to your kind of the premise of your question kind of assumes that the the the RTAs and the WTO are a substitute in a way if you you know you to less RTA you will have to do it in more in the WTO and and I agree with with this in in in some sense but in other in other sense we have to recognize that the the wall of RTAs and especially the regional agreements in which you have several countries the rational is go sometimes beyond economics it's there's some political rational for doing that which the WTO will never be able to to to replace so it's just about the premise that we tend to see this as a substitute you know we focus more on the WTO we will do less of that and that's I don't think is completely true for for you know in every part of the world I'm sorry we've run out of time I don't want to thank you all for coming today I have one announcement they asked me to do this politely and I'm not sure how but the announcement is there's a lunch being served outside and it's not for you in any case thank you for attending and please join me in thanking our panelists