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21 UCLA J. Int'l L. Foreign Aff. 151 (2017)
Setting the Rules of the Game: The Rise (and Fall) of Mega-Regionals, Deep Integration and the Role of the WTO

handle is hein.journals/jilfa21 and id is 159 raw text is: SETTING THE RULES OF THE GAME: THE RISE (AND FALL) OF MEGA- REGIONALS, DEEP INTEGRATION AND THE ROLE OF THE WTO Billy A. Melo Araujo* ABSTRACT Faced with a World Trade Organization (WTO) in a state of paralysis, large developed trading nations have shifted their attentions to other fora to pursue their trade policy objectives. In particular, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are now used to promote the regulatory disciplines that were previously rejected by developing countries at the multilateral level. These deep or twenty-first century PTAs address a variety of issues, from technical norms, procurement, investment protection, and intellectual property rights to social and environmental protection. Moreover, developed countries have recently sought to negotiate highly controversial PTAs that are large in scale, both in terms of economic size and geographical reach, including the mega-regional PTAs, such as the EU- US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the EU-Japan PTA, the Transpacific Partnership, and the China-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. These mega-regional PTAs are distinctive not only in terms of their sheer size and the breadth and depth of issues addressed, but also because some of their proponents readily admit that one of the Lecturer, Queen's University Belfast (B.Melo-Araujo@qub.ac.uk). This Article was prepared for the International Legal Theory Colloquium organized by the Institute for International Law and Justice of the New York University School of Law in Spring 2016. 1 am very grateful to Professor Grainne De Burca, Professor Benedict Kingsbury and the rest of the colloquium participants for their insightful comments on an earlier draft