The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades and Regional Trade Agreements Essay Example

becomes more feasible (AU and Economic Commission for Africa, 2003). At the same time, they can mediate issue within their organization so that WTO members do not have to seek resolution with the WTO, streamline trade and discussion of issues.However, most academics see the prevalence of RTA’s as a threat multilateral trading system. The key issue is with the MFN clause: RTA’s gives preference to member countries which contravenes the stipulation for universal treatment of all countries under GATT. Questions regarding the treatment of regional imports jurisprudence and the related valuation of injuries, requisites of trade parallelism as well as the determination of discriminations are among the issues that still have to be resolved (Crawford and Laird, 2000).In 2005, the European Commission presented a paper whose objective was to resolve the conflict between various GATT provisions and the interest of RTA so that the latter can in fact be an advantage of the WTO.

However, the Research Institute of Economy Trade and Industry in a parallel study point out that RTA’s pose as a competition to WTO member nations and impair the progress of multilateral trading systems development.