Currency Manipulation and WTO Laws: Should the Anti-Dumping Mechanism Be Entirely Dumped?

Currency devaluation resembles subsidy and dumping in terms of its impact on global trade – it grants price advantages to exporting companies. Unlike subsidy and dumping, however, multilateral regulation of currency manipulation is far from sufficient. The World Trade Organization (WTO), whose core principles are undermined by currency manipulation, plays no role in the regulatory framework. This article discusses possible avenues for the WTO to combat currency manipulation in future negotiations. Particularly, it proposes a new approach, which is to allow the application of the surrogate price method in anti-dumping investigations against currency manipulators. The anti-dumping mechanism has long been overlooked in the relevant literature as it is believed to combat company-level activities rather than State-level activities. This new approach proposes to treat fundamental exchange rate misalignment as a special market condition which allows anti-dumping investigation authorities to use the surrogate price method to eliminate the trade distortion caused by it.

Should the WTO deal with e-trade taxation issues?

Electronic commerce may be a great equalizer that helps to reduce, or even to eliminate, distance-related barriers to trade, but it can also exacerbate a so-called ‘digital dividend’ vis-à-vis countries with technological and infrastructural deficiencies, especially developing countries. In the following we concentrate on trade distortion caused by taxation of e-trade in intangible goods. We believe this will have a particular ramification for the developing world. General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) provisions may be relevant to many concerns with respect to the regulations of e-commerce, such as online privacy protection, illegal or illicit content, cyber crime and fraud, en-forcement of contracts, consumer protection, and taxation. In this paper, we will focus our debate mainly on the issues of taxation of e-trade with respect to the two basic principles of the WTO, that is. the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) and the National Treatment (NT) principles.

Doha round of WTO negotiations and the domestic support for agriculture in Serbia

Beside the fact that the green box essential inspection has, obviously, not been carried out, the long expected modality draft in the agricultural sector for July 2006 is full of opposing ponts of view and conflicting solutions to the problem. Thus, the negotiations have been completely suspended, as the very result of the lack of agreement in the field of agriculture (market approach and internal support). It is expected that Doha round of WTO negotiations should result with a significant improvement in reduction of trade distortion support. Serbia is in the process of joining the WTO and is intensively working on meeting the obligations that are expected to be completed in the process; in this case, in the field of internal support to agriculture. .