Enhancing Trade Governance through Bench Marking Transparency Standards in Asia-Pacific Regional Trade Agreements

Transparency, as a fundamental principle of international trade, could reduce the cost caused by information asymmetries and promote market predictability as well as non-discriminatory treatments. This paper examines transparency provisions in both World Trade Organization (WTO) rules at the multilateral level and Asia-Pacific regional trade agreements (RTAs) at the regional as well as bilateral level. Comparing with WTO provisions, the evolving practice in Asia-Pacific RTAs successfully reinforces and deepens current multilateral transparency obligations. Besides, the importance of transparency of the preferential trade treatments is also investigated in the WTO Transparency Mechanism for Preferential Trade Arrangements. The authors argued that the homogenous content of the examined Asia-Pacific RTAs transparency development provides a governance initiative that could well offer lessons for the WTO.