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ID:
078885
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| Publication |
2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The dispute European Communities-Protection of trademarks and geographical indications for agricultural products and foodstuffs, which opposes the European Union with the United States and Australia, has been raised by the European regulation concerning the protection of geographical indications (GIs). This dispute has two important issues. First, the Panel has demonstrated that the European Regulation does not comply with national treatment promulgated by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994. Second, the Panel affirmed the possibility of some coexistence between GIs and identical prior trademarks. This article considers these issues and describes the positions of the parties at the end of the dispute over protection of GIs. The first part discusses the Panel's conclusions on national treatment and the coexistence of GIs and prior trademarks. The second part provides an analysis of the relationship between national treatment and international harmonization of the rules on the protection of GIs. This shows that if the Panel findings do not annihilate the European system of protection of GIs, the United States will find it advantageous to free ride and resist any move towards the European system of protection.
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| 2 |
ID:
136272
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| Summary/Abstract |
The China-Raw Materials dispute recently arbitrated by the WTO opposed China as defendant to the US, the EU and Mexico as the claimants on the somewhat unusual issue of export restrictions on natural resources. For the claimants, Chinese export restrictions on various raw materials, of which the country is a major producer, create shortages in foreign markets increasing the prices of these goods. China defends export limitations by presenting them as a natural resource conserving policy. This paper offers a theoretical analysis of the dispute with the help of a model of a monopoly extracting a non-renewable resource and selling it on both the domestic and foreign markets. The theoretical results focus on the effects of imposing an export quota on quantities, prices and price distortion. Given the crucial importance of demand elasticities in this theoretical understanding of the conflict, the empirical part of the paper provides estimates of import demand elasticity of the parties for each product concerned in the case. The model and the empirical results challenge the ideas that an export quota always favors conservation of natural resource, that a higher foreign price necessarily follows this policy and that it inherently increases price distortion and therefore discrimination.
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