Market Access, Competitiveness, and Harmonization: Environmental Protection in Regional Trade Agreements
![handle is hein.journals/helr21 and id is 273 raw text is: MARKET ACCESS, COMPETITIVENESS, AND
HARMONIZATION: ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
IN REGIONAL TRADE AGREEMENTS
Daniel C. Esty*
Damien Geradin**
I. INTRODUCTION
Free trade among nations produces a range of mutually beneficial
results.' Liberalized trade offers the promise of an increased range
of consumer choice, less expensive manufacturing inputs and con-
sumer goods, and economies of scale resulting in potentially higher
returns on investment for producers of goods and services. Open
markets, furthermore, stimulate social progress as contact among
societies leads to the sharing of ideas and policies, more rapid
diffusion of technological advances, and the development of a com-
mon base of experiences. By increasing interactions between indi-
viduals and building a prosperity based on interdependence, trade
also enhances the prospect of harmony among societies and serves
to promote peace.2 In the wake of the worldwide economic chaos
of the 1930s and World War II, these considerations led to the
establishment of the modern international trade regime embodied
in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).3 The
GATT was designed to provide a structure for international coop-
* Associate Professor, Yale Law School and Yale School of Forestry and Environ-
mental Studies; formerly Deputy Assistant Administrator of Policy, Planning, and Evalu-
ation and chief NAFTA negotiator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Thanks
to Professor Paul Demaret and the participants in the October 1996 University of Liege
Conference on Regional Trade Agreements and Multilateral Rules After the Uruguay
Round for helpful comments. Special thanks to Jamie Art, Todd Millay, and Hari Osofsky
for unflagging research assistance.
** Associate in the Brussels office of the international law firm of Coudert Brothers,
fellow of the Institute for European Legal Studies at the University of Liege, and visiting
lecturer at the University of Paris II (Panth~on-Assas).
1. See JOHN H. JACKSON, WORLD TRADE AND THE LAW OF GATT 9-10 (1969);
ROBERT GILPIN, THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 171 (1987)
(reviewing the benefits of trade).
2. See GILPIN, supra note 1, at 172.
3. General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Oct. 30, 1947, 61 Stat. A-11, 55
U.N.T.S. 194. The GATT was recently subsumed by the World Trade Organization
(WTO), which embodies the results at the Uruguay Round of global trade negotiations.
See Final Act Embodying the Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade
Negotiations, Apr. 15, 1994, 33 I.L.M. 1125 (1994) [hereinafter Final Act].](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/helr21&div=11&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Market Access, Competitiveness, and Harmonization: Environmental Protection in Regional Trade Agreements
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