单独行事 (2)

In the post-war period American governments tended to side with the purists. But according to Anne Krueger of Johns Hopkins University, writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives,

by 1982 gridlock in multilateral talks meant it switched to a twin-track approach, simultaneously pushing for multilateral deals and negotiating preferential ones. Chief among these was the North American Free Trade Agreement,

which came into force in 1994 and is due to be replaced by the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA). The approach spread. Nearly 300 preferential trade deals are now recorded by the WTO.

Many go beyond tariff-cutting to include rules on state-owned enterprises, intellectual property and trade in services. Having grown into an integrated trading area, the EU became an enthusiastic proponent,

striking many reciprocal deals, including with Canada, Mexico and Singapore. In June it started talks with Australia. As such deals proliferated, economists studied their impact. One fear had been that they might divert custom from more efficient producers in third countries.

But a paper by Aaditya Mattoo, Alen Mulabdic and Michele Ruta of the World Bank, published in 2017, found that shallow deals do little to reduce trade with third countries, and deep ones tend to increase it.

This, they think, is because rules on competition policy, subsidies and standards are hard to apply in a discriminatory way. But there is also reason to fear that preferential deals weaken the impetus towards comprehensive liberalisation.

Nuno Limao of the University of Maryland, and others, have found that America and the EU offered less tariff liberalisation in multilateral talks in product areas where they had already granted preferential tariffs in bilateral deals.

Though previous American administrations were sometimes frustrated with the WTO, they viewed it as the foundation of the trading system. Preferential deals were an instrument of diplomacy. TPP was intended to create a template for a trading system that might eventually include China,

and perhaps give reform-minded Chinese policymakers something to aim for.