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On Reforming the Special and Differential Treatment
- 1 New York University
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Abstract
WTO was created to raise living standards, eliminate trade barriers, and thus ensure peaceful relations among nations. However, since the Doha Round negotiation was forced into an indefinite dormancy, WTO has been experiencing a credibility crisis, and the international community has fully recognized the need and urgency of WTO reform. This crisis is mainly manifested as developed and developing countries' disagreements over WTO's differentiated treatment of the latter, and both camps question WTO's ability ever to bridge the gap. But the difficulty of reaching a consensus on the definition of a developing country has hampered the implementation of SDT and international trade. In this article, the feasibility and need for a clear discriminatory criterion were questioned and revisited. It argues that the distinctions between developing and developed countries in international trade law are outdated. It looks for an alternative structure, envisages the possibility of its application to global trade cooperation, and proposes that individual country-based determination regarding obligation and preference level should be made. Meanwhile, the concepts themselves should be used as something other than factors of legal differences between the nature of countries' obligations.
Keywords
WTO, Doha Round negotiation, discriminatory criterion
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Cite this article
Lu,Y. (2023). On Reforming the Special and Differential Treatment. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,9,12-16.
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