Inter‐Governmental Regimes and Recruitment to Private Regimes: GATT/WTO and the ISO, 1951–2005
| Author | Aseem Prakash,Sijeong Lim |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12554 |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
Inter-Governmental Regimes and Recruitment
to Private Regimes: GATT/WTO and the ISO,
1951–2005
Sijeong Lim
University of Amsterdam
Aseem Prakash
University of Washington, Seattle
Abstract
Scholars of international relations and public policy recognize that quasi-private actors supply governance services alongside
governmental actors. We explore how membership in the dominant trade regime, the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade/the World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO) influences countries’incentives to join the quasi-private regime, International
Organization for Standardization (ISO). Both global regimes seek to remove trade barriers; the former focuses on tariff and
non-tariff obstacles, and the latter on technical barriers. While any firm can subscribe to over 18,000 ISO standards, only
national standards bodies, one per country, can become ISO members. We posit that given the substantial political costs of
joining GATT/WTO and the relatively low entry barriers to joining the ISO, high trading countries might view the ISO as a (par-
tial) functional equivalent of the GATT/WTO. Our empirical analysis of ISO membership dynamics over the period 1951–2005
lends support to our argument.
Policy Implications
•When faced with barriers to entry at the dominant trade regime, exporting firms and their governments may consider par-
ticipating in private regimes to influence the trade environment.
•As evidenced in the debates over the reform of UN Security Council and the emergence of the Asian Infrastructure Invest-
ment Bank (AIIB), the institutional architecture and the rule-making powers of global regimes should reflect the power
configurations of the 21st century, and not of the post-World War II order.
•Creating private regimes in a policy area requires factoring in potential participants’positions with regard to the existing
intergovernmental regimes.
•While existing intergovernmental regimes are the key pillars of global governance, their rule-making systems privilege cer-
tain perspectives over others. Private regimes can foster polycentricity and bridge democracy deficits by allowing multiple
stakeholders to create regimes with different rule structures.
1. Choosing trade regimes
Distributional implications of economic openness and its
impact on domestic politics have been discussed extensively
in the literature (Rogowski, 1989; Stolper and Samuelson,
1941; and more recently Kim, 2017; Osgood, 2017). Produc-
ers catering to the domestic market tend to be protectionist
and make the case for erecting trade barriers, especially if
they face competition from foreign firms. Producers export-
ing to foreign markets favor a liberal trade policy and exert
pressures on country governments to join global and regio-
nal regimes such as the World Trade Organization and the
North American Free Trade Association.
Less discussed in the development literature is that the
process of joining a trade regime can pose political and eco-
nomic challenges that are beyond the realm of domestic
trade politics. Powerful countries that serve as gatekeepers
to that regime might want to extract concessions, or impose
excessive burden on potential regime members. Think of
them as political “entry barriers”a country must confront
when it considers membership in a trade regime. Facing a
high entry barrier, this country has two choices. First, it
could agree to the demands of the regime gatekeepers. This
is a high benefit-high cost scenario. Second, the country
might consider joining a trade regime that is an imperfect
functional substitute yet has a substantially lower barrier to
entry. This might be termed as a moderate benefit-moder-
ate cost scenario.
We bring a novel perspective about this issue of choosing
trade regimes by theorizing and empirically examining why
countries seek to join a quasi-private trade regime (Interna-
tional Organization for Standardization, ISO), when they
©2018 The Authors. Global Policy published by Durham University and John Wiley &Sons Ltd. Global Policy (2018) 9:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12554
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Global Policy Volume 9 . Issue 3 . September 2018
352
Research Article
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