Towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and United States

In this research work, the author focuses on the analysis of the activity towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and United States. It has been emphasized that the talks will reduce regulatory barriers. New agreements to remove trade barriers aim at reducing dead-weight costs and at increasing net social gains from international trade. The article examines the impact of free trade agreements like TTIP and, in particular, investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms in reducing the power of national governments to regulate and eliminate market inequality. The article offers examples of successful regulatory cooperation efforts in the hope that it will shed light on possible approaches to addressing regulatory divergences. Ideally, the best way to address problems arising from regulatory divergence would be on a multilateral basis, while taking into account the relations of the EU and the US with other countries. The main aim of the article is the presentation of the challenges for TTIP negotiations. The particular objective of the research task is the regulatory trade barriers in US-EU foreign trade policy, the nature and the promoters of TTIP, the interrelationship between regulatory standards and international cooperation in TTIP. The general theoretical approach will be of broad interest to economists interested in international questions, especially transatlantic cooperation, as well as to political scientists. The main methods applied in this research were the institutional method, comparative method, documentation method and statistical methods. Additionally, the methods of deductive and inductive forecasting were applied

Student Comment: TTIP: A Free Trade Agreement That Strengthens the International Trade Environment and Enhances the Regulatory Powers of the WTO

This comment discusses the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP or the Partnership), a bi-lateral trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, in relation to the World Trade Organization (WTO). TTIP pushes the world towards greater trade liberalization, and if implemented, such a trade agreement would affect trillions of dollars in existing trade. When trade barriers are reduced, a significant amount of new possibilities open up, especially in regards to potential markets for exports, growth and improvement of competitive products, and reduction in the losses associated the border. Since its establishment, the WTO has sought to establish an agreement between its members to reduce tariffs and facilitate free trade. However, it has failed to fulfill its role as a rule-maker, particularly via trade agreements, due to multi-polarity and a decline in United States hegemony. The analysis provided discusses how the Partnership could advance the function of the WTO because the implementation of an international bilateral trade agreement removes the rule-maker duty from the WTO and, instead, allows the WTO to focus on the area of dispute resolution, thus taking on a more “softlaw” approach within international trade, and ideally, returning to its full potential

Student Comment: TTIP: A Free Trade Agreement That Strengthens the International Trade Environment and Enhances the Regulatory Powers of the WTO

This comment discusses the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP or the Partnership), a bi-lateral trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, in relation to the World Trade Organization (WTO). TTIP pushes the world towards greater trade liberalization, and if implemented, such a trade agreement would affect trillions of dollars in existing trade. When trade barriers are reduced, a significant amount of new possibilities open up, especially in regards to potential markets for exports, growth and improvement of competitive products, and reduction in the losses associated the border. Since its establishment, the WTO has sought to establish an agreement between its members to reduce tariffs and facilitate free trade. However, it has failed to fulfill its role as a rule-maker, particularly via trade agreements, due to multi-polarity and a decline in United States hegemony. The analysis provided discusses how the Partnership could advance the function of the WTO because the implementation of an international bilateral trade agreement removes the rule-maker duty from the WTO and, instead, allows the WTO to focus on the area of dispute resolution, thus taking on a more “softlaw” approach within international trade, and ideally, returning to its full potential

Missing in Action? France and the Politicization of Trade and Investment Agreements

Negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) and for the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada have provoked massive mobilization throughout Europe, both on the streets and online. Yet France, long at the epicenter of anti-globalization and anti-Americanism, has played a surprisingly modest role in the mobilization campaign against these agreements. This article asks why France did not contribute to anti-TTIP mobilization and, more broadly, how patterns of French mobilization over trade have changed over the past two decades. Using comparative-historical analysis, we explore to what extent this puzzling French reaction can be traced to changing attitudes towards the US, agenda-shaping by the French government, and transformations in the venues and techniques of social mobilization. We thus contribute to the growing literature on the politicization of trade agreements and offer insights into the links between domestic and international politics

Transparency in transatlantic trade and data law

Transparency continues to occupy a patchy and uneven place in EU and US relations in key economic and regulatory areas. This patchiness plays out in a variety of ways including in downgrading by the US of the EU in diplomatic and regional standing albeit non-expressly in recent times. The chapter explores the shifts in practices on transparency in EU-US cooperation from a legal perspective. It focuses on EU-US trade negotiations and data transfer cooperation. Transparency provides a useful point of departure as it is a common value and instrument for the US and EU, yet one that seems to be utilised very differently. Transatlantic relations increasingly show a tension between the government to government model of transparency. In the EU-US data protection regime of the Privacy Shield a complex constellation of subjects is emerging and its genuine enforcement appears open to significant doubt. In trade, the European Parliament increasingly attempts to participate and involve citizens’ rights in new EU-US negotiations and raise civil liberties, citizens’ mobility rights and public interest themes. In light of these developments, this chapter considers how EU and US are becoming divergent in how they handle both communication with each other and toward citizens. The EU is increasingly becoming an organised transparent actor toward the US and trying to increase transparency toward citizens through different instruments, whereas at the moment we see in the US a disruptive environment of information flows and an administration that disrupts the traditional lines of allies and non-allies in how it behaves

Paths to Fisheries Subsidies Reform: Creating Sustainable Fisheries Through Trade and Economics

The world depends on the oceans for food and livelihood. More than a billion people worldwide depend on fish as a source of protein, including some of the poorest populations on earth. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world must produce 70 percent more food to meet coming hunger needs.Fishing activities support coastal communities and hundreds of millions of people who depend on fishing for all or part of their income. Of the world's fishers, more than 95 percent engage in small-scale and artisanal activity and catch nearly the same amount of fish for human consumption as the highly capitalized industrial sector. Small-scale and artisanal fishing produces a greater return than industrial operations by unit of input, investment in catch, and number of people employed.Today, overfishing and other destructive fishing practices have severely decreased the world's fish populations. The FAO estimates that 90 percent of marine fisheries worldwide are now overexploited, fully exploited, significantly depleted, or recovering from overexploitation

The politicisation of transatlantic trade in Europe: Explaining inconsistent preferences regarding free trade and the TTIP. LEQS Paper No. 151/2019 January 2020

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) generated an unprecedented public contestation across Europe. In this paper, we focus on the sources of such backlash in European public opinion. Previous studies of this issue have analysed opinions on free trade and the specific agreement separately. However, not accounting for their correlated character could lead to biased conclusions about their determinants. To address this, we apply an innovative empirical approach and construct a set of bivariate probit models to calculate joint probabilities for the different configurations of support and opposition. We validate that attitudes toward free trade and the TTIP have similar but not identical foundations. Inconsistent preferences are rooted in individual values, EU attitudes, and political cues, as well as treaty partner heuristics. Our innovative empirical approach offers an improved understanding of trade attitudes within EU’s multilevel context