Reframing the International Trade and Investment Framework to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century

Our contribution explores avenues for renewing the global trade and investment framework, namely the 29 WTO agreements, the 303 regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the 3,291 international trade agreements. investment (AII). The crisis in which the WTO, the central institution of this framework, is plunged, will be the common thread of this reflection. We aim provide an answer that goes beyond the idea that the WTO crisis is due to the conflicting interests of large number of members. This view tends to focus attention on issues internal to the WTO: its governance and decision-making procedures. It stresses on the behaviour of countries, formal decision-making processes or the governance mechanisms of the WTO. It largely confines debate about DDA deadlocks to issues of institutional design and technical management of the negotiations. We assume a political economy approach. The multilateral trade and investment framework crisis can be explained, first of, all by the fact that it is regulated by agreements negotiated twenty-five years ago (1995) by the Quadrilateral (United States, European Union, Canada, Japan). China was not a member of the WTO at the time, the BASICs (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) did not represent more than 4.6% of world merchandise exports, internet and digitalization were embryonic, and Asia-Pacific-centric global value chains had not fundamentally changed global trade and investment system. We will first examine developments of the global trade and investment system and the possible repercussions of the global health crisis on it. In fact, the global pandemic crisis opens a new sequence in globalization process, where power rivalries, evident since the 2007-2008 crisis, could lead to a more conflictual global political economy. This would make it more imperative to renovate the international trade and investment framework. Facing a less asymmetric and more state-centric and heterogeneous global trade and investment system, the new framework could open up to: i) more flexibilities regarding North-South relations; ii) more institutional and normative pluralism regarding future trade agreements and; iii) institutional experimentation to improve WTO governance.