IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ags/ecjilt/299755.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Loopholes, Legal Interpretations and Game Playing: Whither the WTO without the Spirit of the GATT?

Author

Listed:
  • Kerr. William A.

Abstract

As with any document with legal form, the GATT and WTO agreements are replete with loopholes, vagueness and procedural rigidities that can be used to thwart or diminish the efficacy of what was intended when the document was agreed and drafted. Exploitation of such weaknesses is expected in, for example, tax codes. Until recently, the member states of the WTO have largely refrained from taking advantage of the opportunities for circumvention presented in the legal documents. The reason lies in the conduct embodied in the Spirit of the GATT which was informally embraced by member states and their diplomats right from the inception of the GATT. In recent years, however, acceptance of the Spirit of the GATT has waned, leading to exploitation of loopholes and other weaknesses of the WTO architecture, which threatens the ability of the organization and its agreements to function as intended. This paper examines two loopholes – (1) the Article XX(a) public morals exemptions and (2) the Article XXI national security exemption – and looks at how their recent use threatens the future viability of the WTO.

Suggested Citation

  • Kerr. William A., 2019. "Loopholes, Legal Interpretations and Game Playing: Whither the WTO without the Spirit of the GATT?," Estey Centre Journal of International Law and Trade Policy, Estey Centre for Law and Economics in International Trade, vol. 19(2), December.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:ecjilt:299755
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.299755
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/299755/files/Kerr20-2lay.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.299755?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kerr, William A., 2024. "Great Leaps Forward and GATT Article XVIII," Estey Centre Journal of International Law and Trade Policy, Estey Centre for Law and Economics in International Trade, vol. 25(1), June.
    2. Ryan Cardwell & William A. Kerr, 2021. "President Biden's international trade agenda: Implications for the Canadian agrifood sector," Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics/Revue canadienne d'agroeconomie, Canadian Agricultural Economics Society/Societe canadienne d'agroeconomie, vol. 69(1), pages 19-25, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    International Relations/Trade;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:ecjilt:299755. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esteyca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.