This week marks the start of my research into the various levels of e-commerce and how they fit into Free Trade Agreements. One point that was made in several of the articles was that one can’t have e-commerce without the ‘e’ — referring to the fact that personal computers and internet access are necessary precursors to building e-commerce in a country. This ties into issues of the digital divide, in the case of DR-CAFTA, in both the US and its developing country partners.

To me, Chapter Fourteen of DR-CAFTA reads pretty weak on the issues that are commonly associated with e-commerce, such as internet governance, security and reliability issues, content regulation and so on.

Recognizing the global nature of electronic commerce, the Parties affirm the importance of: (a) working together to overcome obstacles encountered by small and medium enterprises in using electronic commerce;… [Link]

Though in the USTR’s summary of the agreement, the parts in the chapter regarding customs duties and non-discrimination are ‘a major advance over previous international understandings on this subject.’ [PDF Link]. (more…)

News and links for this week

The WTO’s Appellate Body released it’s annual report this week. [Link]

France (EUR 750,000), Lithuania (CHF 46,087), and Estonia (CHF 15,000) donated to the Doha Development Fund, which provides training and activities for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Developing Countries. None of the DR-CAFTA countries are LDCs — indeed Haiti is the only LDC in the Americas — however all members save the United States are ‘developing countries’ and thus can potentially take advantage of this fund.

Via the International Economic Law and Policy blog, the WTO has announced its interim report (which I believe is only available to the parties) in the dispute over internet gambling with Antigua and Barbuda. For more on this, you might try this article. [Link]. Looking at such diverse areas as internet gambling will be one of the areas that we will touch on with this study of FTAs and IT-based businesses.

DR-CAFTA member Nicaragua is stepping closer to joining ALBA — a ‘framework agreement’ was approved by the Venezuelan National Assembly for a trade deal / cooperation agreement between the two countries. [Link to bilaterals.org]. See also this past post.

Doha - is it live or is it dead? Daniel Ikenson discusses some of the bigger picture items surrounding the future of world trade from a US perspective over at Cato. [Link].

This post is a little different, so hold on to your hats.

I attended a lecture/talk at a meeting of the Legal Theory Reading Group here at the University of Edinburgh last night by Professor Zenon Bankowski about a new paper he is working on. I’m certainly no legal theory expert, but this is what I gathered was the core of his idea:

• The act of giving necessarily means that you will change because of that gift — this is related to the idea that you expect/get something in return whenever you give, even if it is just a warm fuzzy feeling.
• People naturally fear change.
• The fear of change is reduced by giving only to people who are like you (or act within your expectations).
• Law structures how we give and reduces the risk with giving.
• The entire process, and especially the idea of law as an institution governing our relationships, is in a process of feedback with our individual acts.

Now I don’t want to get into to much of the theory, but I was thinking about this as illuminating to the psychology of FTAs — specifically about the idea of only transacting business (giving) with those whom you understand (i.e. are like you). This seems to me to have some relationship with Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), which is the key goal for many developing countries when they decide to sign an FTA. (more…)

Selected news and sites from today’s research:

The International Economic Law and Policy Blog notes that more than just the threat of a WTO dispute can affect domestic farm subsidies — the cost of the Iraq war will hurt the budget for US agriculture spending.

Speaking of domestic farm subsidies, Ben Muse has a post on the EU / US trade deal involving capping these subsidies. It looks like this deal could revive the Doha Round.

Both of these posts, for me, reinforce the need to look at the circumstances of these agreements holistically, as many forces come into play when negotiating these agreements.

And in regional political news, bilaterals.org has a copy of an AP story ‘Unification remains elusive at Mercosur‘ discussing last week’s two-day Mercosur summit. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales were both there advocating a reformation of Mercosur to focus in on areas other than free trade.

The Chavez / Morales agenda is the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA in Spanish). This is an agreement put forth as an alternative to FTAs, and emphasizes social policy rather than ‘free trade’.

For more links, you might want to see this ZNet story, the ALBA wikipedia entry, and this piece from venezuelanalysis.com.

(via bilaterals.org) The draft treaty language of the proposed Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Panama is out as of the 19th of January.

The text is available (in English) on the USTR site.

Bilaterals.org reports that the Spanish version will be out on the Ministerio de Comercio e Industrias website.

This agreement will also naturally be a part of this project. After a very quick scan of the documents, it appears to me that the IPR(pdf) and E-Commerce(pdf) provisions, at least, are either substantially the same or even exactly the same as the provisions in the Domincan Republic - Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR CAFTA).

Perhaps the Panamanian Government got the exact same deal as the DR-CAFTA nations? Comments on the agreement, as well as possible reasons why Panama did not participate in the DR-CAFTA negotiations are very welcome.

In doing some preliminary research (looking for good blogs to add to my feeds), I came across an entry in Jonathan Tasini’s Working Life Blog entitled CAFTA fight lives on from August of 2005. In it, he discusses what he says is ‘the nonsence behind the phrase “free trade”‘. He elaborates:

“free trade” does not exist–it’s a marketing phrase intended to blind people by using two words that few people would find objectionable (everyone likes the idea of trading and who is against something that’s FREE!!!)

This kind of talk reminds me of that other famous ‘free’ — the one in ‘free software’. Stallman’s saying for elaborating that free is ‘free as in free speech, not as in free beer‘.

It also is, as Tasini rightly points out, that part of the politics behind these agreements is the language used — as any politician can tell you. Any geek can as well — there is an entire debate over the terms ‘open source’ versus ‘free software’, with many people (myself included) often compromising with FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

The only other term that I can think of for the agreements (as opposed to the concept generally) is ‘regional trade agreements’, which is the phrase used in the (excellent) new book Regional Trade Agreements and the WTO Legal System edited by Edinburgh academic Lorand Bartels and Federico Ortino (I just got it for this project).

So should this blog be called the ‘regional trade blog’?

One answer is simply that ‘Free Trade Agreement’ is much more popular than the alternative (1 million+ hits versus 58,000 on Google) and therefore is the better in terms of site recognition and accepted use.

Another answer would be that ‘free trade’ is the simply the name of the market concept that is driving these agreements, even if the result is less than the pure concept. ‘Free trade’ is the condition where trade is not restricted by tariff or non-tariff barriers. I’ll be posting more about the concept, and its relationship to IP and IT, in the coming weeks and months.

This post also triggered memories of discussing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in underg