Sunday 15 April 2012

India's stand on key WTO issues

Reproduced from Economic Survey 2012, Box 7.4, pp 174

Agriculture
 Substantial and effective reductions in overall trade-distorting domestic support (OTDS) of the US and EU;
 Self-designation of an appropriate number of special products (SP for which developing countries are to be given extra flexibility in market access for food and livelihood security and rural development);
 An operational and effective Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM-a tool that will allow developing countries to raise tariffs temporarily to deal with import surges or price falls.);
 Simplification and capping of developed country tariffs.

Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA)
 Adequate and appropriate flexibilities for protecting economically vulnerable industries;
 Participation in sectoral initiatives only on a non-mandatory and good faith basis without prejudgment of the final outcome, with substantial special and differential treatment provisions for developing countries;
 Serious consideration of non-tariff barrier (NTB) textual proposals with wide support such as the horizontal mechanism. [Non-tariff barriers include quotas, import licensing systems, sanitary regulations, prohibitions, etc.]

Services
 Need for qualitative improvement in the revised offers especially on Modes 1(cross-border supply) and 4 (movement of natural persons);
 Appropriate disciplining of domestic regulations by developed countries.

Rules
 Tightening of disciplines on anti-dumping (deletion of zeroing clause and reiteration of the lesser duty rule). [An investigating authority usually calculates the dumping margin by getting the average of the differences between the export prices and the home market prices of the product in question. When it chooses to disregard or put a value of zero on instances when the export price is higher than the home market price, the practice is called “zeroing”. Critics claim this practice artificially inflates dumping margins.]
 Effective special and differential treatment for developing countries on fisheries subsidies.

Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)
 Establishing a clear linkage between the TRIPS Agreement and the Convention on Bio-diversity (CBD) by incorporating specific disclosure norms for patent applications;
 Enhanced protection for geographical indications (GIs) other than wines and spirits.

Sources:
Definitions of terms from : http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/glossary_e/glossary_e.htm

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