Straining the Spaghetti Bowl: Re-Evaluating the Regulation of Preferential Rules of Origin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Preferential rules of origin (PROOs) are a hallmark of the modern Regional Trade Agreement network. However, the ever-rising use of PROOs has revealed their dual economic function: to prevent trade deflection from occurring, and to export domestic State protectionism to the regional level. This paper challenges existing scholarship and reassesses the WTO disciplines applicable to PROOs. Using the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement as a case-study, it examines the ways in which PROOs have obstructed trade liberalization at the regional level in favour of embedding protectionism in certain sectors. The disciplines under Article III:4 GATT, Annex II of the Agreement on Rules of Origin, and the Trade Facilitation Agreement are then shown to limit Members’ discretion in adopting PROOs. Finally, the internal and external conditions of Article XXIV GATT further restrain the extent to which Members may lawfully export their domestic protectionism through Regional Trade Agreements. Crucially, violations of the restraints under Article XXIV GATT are unlikely to be justified based on Article XX(d) GATT.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.071 | 0.106 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".