Trade facilitation: Technical regulations and customs procedures

This paper examines technical regulations (TRs) and customs regulations together, under the general headline of trade facilitation. Both subjects raise the same challenge: how to minimise the unnecessary burden - for trading partners and domestic consumers - of the application and enforcement of national laws and regulations. Such national measures reflect each WTO Member's right to regulate its own economy as it wishes. In both areas symmetrical demands are triggered from industrial and developing countries, suggesting beneficial trade-offs in future WTO negotiations. This paper asks what can be done at the multilateral level during the coming decade in this vast trade facilitation field. It is organised as follows. Section 2 tries to provide some quantitative estimates of the importance of trade facilitation issues. Section 3 looks at the possibility for multilateral actions for addressing the issues raised by the design of trade facilitation-related regulations. Section 4 does the same, but at the level of the enforcement of trade facilitation-related regulations. Section 5 concludes.