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1 - Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2009

By
Andrew D. Mitchell  and
Tania Voon
Edited by
Simon Lester  and
Bryan Mercurio
Simon Lester
Affiliation:
WorldTradeLaw.net LLC
Bryan Mercurio
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
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Summary

Introduction

Former Deputy Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Andrew Stoler has described the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) as a ‘third wave’ free trade agreement (FTA) that goes ‘beyond the envelope of the WTO’, in the sense that it ventures into areas barely covered in the WTO agreements, like competition, and expands on WTO disciplines in other areas, like services and intellectual property. Going beyond the existing WTO rules does not, of course, necessarily constitute progress, or even greater trade liberalization. In this chapter, we consider the extent to which the AUSFTA represents an improvement on the WTO bargain from the perspective of the two parties as well as the broader WTO membership.

Before considering how the AUSFTA came about, we now provide an introductory snapshot of the trading and broader relationship between these two countries. United States (US) trade data indicate that the value of US exports of goods to Australia in 2006 totalled around US$17.8 billion and the value of US imports of goods from Australia amounted to US$8.2 billion. This put Australia within the top 15 countries for US exports in 2006. Services trade appears more balanced, with the Australian government reporting exports to the US at approximately AU$5.4 billion for 2005–6 and imports from the US at around AU$7.1 billion for the same period.

Type
Chapter
Information
Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements
Case Studies
 , pp. 6 - 43
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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References

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