On 16th June, 2023, the first international workshop of the SNSF funded Sinergia project “Making Trade Agreements Work in the Service of Society” was organised at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. The interdisciplinary research team under the lead of Richard Baldwin, Joost Pauwelyn,  Cédric Dupont and Marcelo Olarreaga, brought together legal, economic, and political science scholars with trade policy practitioners to discuss key research questions relating to ‘trade liberalisation packages’. In times of rising anti-trade sentiments, ‘trade liberalisation packages’ seek to address the negative spillovers of free trade by tying international trade agreements legally or politically together with domestic legislation, private standards, or other policy instruments.

The legal team with Charlotte Sieber-Gasser and Rohan opened the discussion with a conceptual overview differentiating flanking policies from mitigation policies to address the negative effects of trade liberalisation. Gregory Shaffer, in his presentation, emphasised the need to retool trade policy and agreements to address negative externalities. Timothy Meyer then added another dimension to the concept of flanking policies by classifying them into first- and second-generation flanking policies, based on whether they respond to domestic or extraterritorial externalities. Finally, Kathleen Claussen focused on understanding how trade-related commitments and flanking policies are embedded in domestic law.    

Turning to the politics behind ‘trade liberalisation packages’, Noémie Laurens and Christian Winkler discussed two main purposes of flanking measures: increasing aggregate social welfare by mitigating the negative externalities of trade and helping to build domestic coalitions in support of trade liberalisation. Layna Mosley and Peter Rosendorff focused more closely on the political economy behind liberalisation packages, pointing to the potential limits of such packages when it comes to restoring public support for trade openness. Linking trade and security, Christina Davis discussed the impact of bureaucratic design on trade policy, emphasising the role institutional structures may play in the crafting of package treaties. The role of non-trade issues was further stressed by Marine Roux and Kirthana Ganeson who presented a study on the drivers behind democracy-related provisions in trade agreements.

Finally, the economics team with Camille Reverdy and Giovanni Donato presented their ongoing work on a database of official ex-ante impact assessments (IAs) of preferential trade agreements. Special guests Ignacio Garcia Bercero, Sergio Balibrea, Dmitry Grozoubinski, Yasmin Ismail, and Didier Chambovey offered their practitioner’s perspective on the motives and uses of IAs and recognised the importance of research to shed light on the usefulness of these tools in identifying the spillovers of trade liberalisation. 

Bernard Hoekman, Meredith Crowley, and Joseph Francois acted as discussants for the different panels and provided insightful comments on the economics of package treaties that will help shape the Sinergia project in its continuation.

Key takeaways and next steps:

• The scope of flanking policies should be clearly defined.
• Studying the political economy behind liberalisation packages is key.
• The project could explore issues beyond labour and the environment, such as, security, competition, and taxation.
• The effectiveness of the impact assessment processes should be explored.
• Capacity-building and institutional support provisions should be investigated further as they play an important role in complementing traditional enforcement provisions.
• The implementation challenges at the ground need to be considered when evaluating the quality of trade liberalisation packages.