Swedish economist Fredrik Erixon, an authority on international trade policy, who heads up the Brussels-based think tank known as ECIPE (the European Centre for International Political Economy), was a big contributor to the discussions held this week in conjunction with Cato’s TTIP conference.  Among many other trade topics, Fredrik has written extensively on TTIP, the WTO, and how the former may impact the latter.

In his conference essay, Erixon agrees with alarmed, “pure” multilateralists that the TTIP will supplant the WTO as “the organising entity of future trade policy,” but explains why that is not necessarily a bad thing.  While he dismisses fears that the United States and European Union may be turning toward an arrangement that excludes the rest of the world, and explains how they will “leverage TTIP for global trade liberalisation,”  Fredrik does worry that TTIP – if it “succeeds” in the area of regulatory harmonization – will result in the export of failed regulatory policies to the rest of the world.

His concluding remarks on that topic: 

Currently, the differences between EU and U.S. regulations and regulatory approaches are far too wide for the TTIP to be a realistic candidate for setting the global rules in this area. But TTIP will likely push trade agreements further in the direction of prescriptive regulatory conditionality, making it harder for trade agreements in the future to advance global commercial freedom through deregulation and simple, transparent rules.

Read Erixon’s essay here; see him discuss the issues during this conference session; see all the conference essays here.