Atlantic Council Publishes WTO Reform Article Co-Written by Stephen Kho

“A new beginning: The case for incremental, confidence-building WTO reform,” an article co-authored by Akin Gump international trade partner Stephen Kho and Mark Linscott, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, has been published on the Atlantic Council’s blog.

The article discusses aspects of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that are in need of repair or reform, especially where the Trump administration has taken positions against the organization, such as in selecting a new director-general and in filling vacancies on the WTO’s Appellate Body.

The Trump administration’s opposition aside, Kho, who served as legal advisor to the U.S. Mission to the WTO in Geneva, and Linscott write that there have been tensions in the organization for years, such as those between ambitious, large-scale initiatives and smaller, discrete areas to achieve trade agreements.

They note, however, “Important efforts are now underway to strike additional [discrete] agreements, such as on fisheries subsidies and digital trade, but a failure in leadership, not from the director-general but instead its key Members, has made bridging gaps and finding ways forward much more difficult,” pointing to differences in approach between the U.S. and China as one example.

The authors note that the advent of the Biden administration “might come in at just the right time to spur efforts to put the WTO back on track, as it was in its first years.” One way forward, they note, would be for the WTO to “focus on incremental progress, even if that means leaving some Members out of new agreements.”

One area for reform, they write, would be dispute settlement, where “there appears to be widespread support in Geneva for restraining the Appellate Body’s inclination to legislate, through its decisions, new WTO rules.” Another area may be fisheries subsidies.

In all cases, the authors believe, “With an incremental approach, each negotiation would rise or fall on its own merits…The incremental approach does change the dynamics of trade-offs, but a well-prepared plurilateral approach can create a momentum of its own.”

They close the article by stating, “A new strategy is needed, and patience is essential, as long as it leads to new opportunities to bridge gaps. This is a vision that is realistic—certainly much more so than reconstituting a new, wide-ranging negotiating round akin to the Doha Round and Uruguay Round—although it is admittedly not a sure thing. It will still require true committed leadership, at least among a core group, which will have to include the United States. A Biden administration might be just what is needed to help move from vision to execution.”

To read the full article, click here.