Study Of Trade Policy Review Mechanism

As Annex 3 of Marrakesh Agreement Establishing World Trade Organization, TPRM is the first multilateral agreement of Uruguay Round. It comes into being and develops on the basis of summarizing the experience and lessons from over 40 years' operation of GATT. This mechanism regularly investigates the trade policies of its members, most of which are countries, analyses and evaluates the effects of their trade policies and practices on the multi-lateral trading system for the purpose of promoting adherence to WTO rules and commitments. As a general and non-judicial international supervision system, it works side by side with dispute-settlement mechanism to ensure the effective operation of the multi-lateral trading system. It is valuable either in the WTO framework, or to the development of international law. By affirming the achievements of TPRM and from economic and legal point of view, this paper attempts to give this mechanism a thorough analysis on the level of theory and operation and puts forward some specific suggestions to perfect the agreement and to improve the review procedure. I will regard this article as a personal review of TPRM since its establishment and hope it will function more actively and fully within WTO framework in the future.This paper can be divided into 5 parts: The first part describes the evolution of TPRM, which has undergone an unusual process: from GATT rules and Tokyo Round Negotiation to Uruguary Round Negotiation. The second part is concerned about the contents of TPRM, including the contents of the agreement and the trade policy review process. The third part analyzes the value and feature of TPRM. The fourth part probes into TPRM's improvement and at the same time discusses some substantial questions relating to trade policy review. The last part raises some specific suggestions in the light of the countermeasures taken after China's accession to WTO.