Articles

Mondiale standaarden of race-to-the-bottom ? : Een analyse van regelgevende samenwerking in de onderhandelingen over een Trans-Atlantisch Vrijhandels- en Investeringsakkoord (TTIP)

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Abstract

Since the summer of 201 3, the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) are negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and lnvestment Partnership (TTIP). Especially for the EU, this is one of the policy priorities for the present term. TTIP is supposed to bring much-needed growth and jobs and to enable the EU to remain a global standardsetter, all without lowering EU levels of regulatory protection. Opponents of the agreement,  however, fear that TTIP wou ld lead to a regulatory race-to-the-bottom. This article scrutinizes these cla ims through a detailed document analysis complemented with a number of interviews. lt is embedded in the political-economic literature on the trade-regu lation nexus as well as on exporting standards and secondary literature on past EU-US regulatory cooperation attempts. We argue that the effects of TTIP are dependent on the concrete mode of regulatory convergence chosen in the agreement. lf, as seems presently most plausible, the negotiators opt for bilateral mutual recognition as their preferred mode for regulatory convergence, the plausibility that TTIP would lead to global standards is reduced. The risk of running into a regulatory race-to-the-bottom increases in that case, but will ultimately depend on the number of sectors where this mode is applicable and under which conditions this is applied.  We conclude that the probability is low that the TTIP agreement being negotiated will lead either to a significant increase in global standards or to a direct large-scale race to-the-bottom.

How to Cite:

De Ville, F. & Gheyle, N., (2015) “Mondiale standaarden of race-to-the-bottom ? : Een analyse van regelgevende samenwerking in de onderhandelingen over een Trans-Atlantisch Vrijhandels- en Investeringsakkoord (TTIP)”, Res Publica 57(3), 295-318.