Work

Competitive Liberalization and the ‘Global Europe’ Services and Investment Agenda: Locating the Commercial Drivers of the EU–ACP Economic Partnership Agreements*

Year: 2011

Type: article

Abstract: In the last decade the European Union (EU) has been negotiating with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries to establish Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). In this article, EPAs are located within the context of the wider shift in EU trade policy towards bilateralism. This is done with reference to recent work in International Political Economy (IPE) emphasizing the ‘domestic‐societal’ and ‘systemic’ drivers of preferential liberalization. Although these pressures are not necessarily sufficient to explain the EPAs, they do account for why they have gone beyond the original remit of ‘World Trade Organization (WTO) compatibility’ and why aspects of the agreements bear close similarity to the EU's supposedly more commercially oriented bilateral agreements.

Source: JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5965.2011.02220.x

Authors: TONY HERON, GABRIEL SILES‐BRÜGGE

Institutions: University of Sheffield, Oxford Brookes University

Language: English

Topic: European Union Policy and Governance

Subfield: Political Science and International Relations

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Partnerships for the goals

Open Access status: bronze

Funder: Economic and Social Research Council