World Trade Organization

The World Trade Report of 2010 highlights four major issues that relate to natural issues of trade. The report looks at the trade exercised in natural resources like forestry, fisheries, and fuels and in mining as well. The main focus is on the characteristics of natural resources’ trade, policy options that are on offer for governments and on the role played by international cooperation, specifically by the WTO, in the proper control of trade in natural resources management (The World Trade Organization, 2012).

The main question was the extent to which nations profit from an open market for natural resources. The main issues that were examined in the Report included the role played by trade in offering access to natural resources, the impact of international trade on the management of natural resources, the impact of the resources trade on the environment, commonly known natural resources curse as well as resource price volatility.

The main issues highlighted are the scope of the major measures used in the natural resources fields like on export taxes, subsidies and tariffs, and offers information on their existing use. It analyzed clearly the effects of the tools used in the policies on a given economy and on the partners involved in traiding.

To sum up the entire Report, a general overview on the manner in which natural resources fit very well in the legal structure of the WTO features immensely. A discussion on other international agreements is also provided that control trade of natural resources. A number of hurdles are also highlighted mainly on the regulation of the policy on export, how subsidies are treated, the issue of trade facilitation, and the connection that exists between the rules of WTO and other agreements that are held internationally.

In the World Trade Report of 2011, the main issue is on the ever-increasing number of preferential trade agreements commonly known as PTAs. The PTAs are a prominent characteristic of the international trade. The 2011 World Trade Report defines how the PTAs have developed from the past and the existing landscapes on the agreements. It evaluates the reason why PTAs have developed, their effects on the economy, and the constituents of the agreements by themselves (Monge-Ariño 2011, pp. 23-47). Ultimately, it takes into account the link between the multilateral system of trade and the PTAs at large.

For one, accumulated trade opening features at the regional, unilateral and multilateral level. This was reported to have reduced the range of providing preferential tariffs on PTAs. Consequently, a very small section of the universal merchandise trade gets preferences as well as preferential tariffs ending up being unimportant in PTAs. Additionally, the Report showed that many more PTAs were going past the laid down preferential tariffs with many non-tariff regions of a regulatory kind being added to the agreements.

The universal networks of production could have been prompting the surfacing of intense PTAs as reported in the 2011 World Trade Report (par. 1-5). This was mainly good governance on a wide range of regulatory regions that was considered very much of a great significance to the given networks as compared to reductions that were offered in low tariffs. The econometric evidence provided and the case studies well supported this connection that existed between networks of production and intense PTAs.

The World Trade Report of 2011 culminated by evaluating the challenge that the emerging PTAs presented at that time to the multilateral trade system and proposed various options to enhance the coherence that existed between the agreements and the system of trading as regulated by the World Trade Organization.