No News From Geneva: The Changing Relationship of Regional Trade Agreements and the WTO
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an article entitled “News from Geneva on RTAs and WTO-plus, WTO-More, and WTO-Minus”, published in 2009, Gabrielle Marceau analyzed the jurisdictional conflicts between Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), introducing the now classic WTO-plus, WTO-more, and WTO-minus typology. At the time, she feared that the multiplication of RTAs, with their own rules and dispute settlement mechanisms, could undermine coherence and crowd out multilateral rulemaking, though she also noted their potential to serve as laboratories for future multilateralization. Today, however, in the context of a weakened WTO—paralyzed in its dispute settlement and sidelined in negotiations—RTAs function more as a safety net, replicating and reinforcing multilateral rules. The article revisits the three categories: WTO-plus provisions deepen liberalization and align with WTO goals, though they may duplicate or decentralize obligations; WTO-more provisions broaden trade agreements to cover social, environmental, and sustainability concerns, which have now moved from the margins to the core of trade policy; and WTO-minus provisions restrict existing WTO rights or obligations, posing risks to developing countries and representing an existential threat to multilateralism. The overall argument is that while the WTO’s centrality has eroded, RTAs can either stabilize and renew the global trade order through WTO-plus and WTO-more provisions or fragment it further if WTO-minus trends prevail.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
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".