A gradual construction of the WTO membership: testing the immediate and independent liberalizing effects of the accession process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In order to obtain GATT/WTO membership, aspiring countries are willing to go through the prolonged and rigid accession process, and signal their sincerity and compliance by implementing trade liberalization even before accession. In turn, concessions and commitments made during negotiations for entry guarantee trade gains after accession. This observation is confirmed by a panel analysis on fifty countries from 1952 to 2004. The impacts of GATT/WTO membership and the rigorous accession process are significant not only statistically, but also economically. This paper makes a contribution to the existing literature by highlighting the immediate and independent effect of the accession process on international trade, so that rigorous accession is not merely an assurance of the effectiveness of GATT/WTO membership. Taking this effect into consideration, becoming a GATT/WTO member is more like a gradual process of construction that starts at the point of application for membership, and ignoring this effect would underestimate the true effectiveness of the GATT/WTO as a trade-promoting organization. Such a re-conceptualization improves our understanding of the capacity and limits of the WTO as an international institution, thus advancing our understanding of the regulation of global affairs.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.071 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".