Magister Legum - LLM / The research paper seeks to investigate the possible ways in which African countries can maximise their benefit from the existing special and differential treatment clauses for trade in agriculture, and, then, make recommendations as to what should be the potential bargaining position of African countries with regard to future trade negotiations on agricultural trade. / South Africa

The thesis deals with a role of developing countries within the WTO and examines whether the developing countries are sufficiently involved in WTO negotiations in order not to play only a marginal role in the multilateral trade system. Thesis contains a historical overview of special and differential treatments for developing countries and the least developed countries. Thesis deals in addition with an issue of the implementation of special and differential treatments and describes the main WTO bodies concerned with implementation. Trade-related technical assistance programs are described in the last part of the thesis. These programs are JITAP, IF and the initiative Aid for Trade.

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Magister Legum - LLM

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:33:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Carlos Willians Osorio.pdf: 1082658 bytes, checksum: 73921d0f02d430dfae4fa6fce3d3d35c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-08-08 / The small business is one of the main pillars of the economy, both the number of establishments and geographical desconcentration, as its ability to generate jobs statistically proven facts. For this reason, they become deserving of public policies to support and encourage the growth, profitability and business sustainability. From this evidence, the limitation of the study includes understanding the importance of this segment to the country, combined with the effectiveness of public policies intended for, in the context of differential treatment guaranteed by the fundamental rule. / A empresa de pequeno porte constitui um dos principais pilares de sustentação da economia, tanto pelo número de estabelecimentos e desconcentração geográfica, quanto pela sua capacidade de gerar empregos fatos comprovados estatisticamente. Por essa razão, tornam-se merecedoras de políticas públicas de apoio e incentivo ao seu crescimento, rentabilidade e sustentabilidade empresarial. A partir dessa constatação, a limitação do estudo abarca a compreensão da relevância desse segmento para o país, articulada com a efetividade das políticas públicas a ele destinadas, no contexto do tratamento diferenciado garantido pelo Texto Fundamental.

Magister Legum - LLM / South Africa

Au cours des dernières années, plusieurs réformes pénales ont été implantées, surtout aux États-Unis, dans l’objectif d’uniformiser les pratiques des tribunaux. Alors que ces nouvelles mesures devaient empêcher l’apparition d’écarts injustifiés basés sur les caractéristiques individuelles des justiciables, les chercheurs s’entendent encore aujourd’hui pour dire que des variations liées au genre existent toujours à travers les décisions judiciaires. Les femmes feraient généralement l’objet d’un traitement plus clément, notamment à l’étape de la détermination de la peine. Cependant, très peu de cet intérêt scientifique s’est concentré sur le contexte pénal canadien. Ainsi, l’objectif général de cette étude est de vérifier si le genre influence les décisions des tribunaux criminels canadiens. Plus spécifiquement, les analyses permettent d’évaluer comment le traitement judiciaire varie selon le genre du justiciable à quatre étapes du processus judiciaire : la détention provisoire, la poursuite des accusations, le verdict de culpabilité ainsi que la détermination de la peine. Pour ce faire, les données administratives de l’Enquête intégrée sur les tribunaux de juridiction criminelle (EITJC) sont examinées. Elles comprennent plus de trois millions d’accusations criminelles portées contre des adultes de 18 à 98 ans à travers le Canada, de 2007 à 2016 inclusivement. L’effet du genre est mesuré à l’aide de régressions multiples et logistiques, en contrôlant pour divers facteurs tels que les antécédents criminels et le type d’infraction. Les analyses révèlent que le genre a un effet significatif sur l’ensemble des décisions étudiées. De manière générale, une plus grande clémence est accordée aux femmes dans le processus judiciaire canadien, celles-ci ayant plus de probabilités d’obtenir une décision moins sévère que les hommes à toutes les étapes analysées. Cependant, comme les disparités liées au genre pourraient s’expliquer par des facteurs qui n’ont pas été inclus dans les modèles prédictifs, les résultats présentent certaines limites. La question entourant la légitimité du traitement différentiel des femmes lors de leur passage en justice demande à être explorer plus en profondeur. / Over the past few years, several sentencing reforms have been implemented, particularly in the United States, to standardize judicial discretionary practices. Although these new measures were created to prevent unwarranted disparities related to individual characteristics, researchers agree that gender disparities still exist in various courts decisions today. Women are often given more leniency, especially at the sentencing stage. However, very little of this scientific interest has focused on the Canadian criminal context. Therefore, the main goal of this research is to analyze the influence of gender on Canadian criminal court decisions. More specifically, the study assesses how judicial treatment differs between men and women at four stages of the Canadian legal process: pre-trial detention, prosecution, conviction and sentencing. To verify this, administrative data from the Integrated Criminal Courts Survey (ICCS) are examined. They include more than 3 million criminal charges against adults aged from 18 to 98 across Canada, from 2007 to 2016 inclusively. The effect of gender is measured using multiple and logistic regressions, controlling for various factors such as criminal record and type of offense. Statistical analyses reveal that gender has a significant effect on all the decisions studied. Overall, women benefit from more leniency in the Canadian legal process, as they are more likely to receive a less severe decision than men at all stages analyzed. However, because gender disparity may be explained by factors that were not included in the predictive models, the results have certain limitations. Questions remain regarding the legitimacy of the differential treatment of women in the justice system and therefore, the gender gap should be further explored.

<p>This dissertation consists of three major chapters. The first chapter is dedicated to testing a novel gravity model of international trade, while the last two chapters explore cross-country commitment and implementation behavior within the World Trade Organization’s Trade Facilitation Agreement. </p> <p><strong>Chapter 1:</strong> I test a novel theoretical gravity model of international trade on firm-level export data from Colombia in 2018. The model assumes a power law relationship between trade flows and distance, with the distance elasticity resulting from two dynamic processes: firm-export growth captured in a Pareto distribution; and the growth of the distance over which those exports are sold. Although the model has been shown to work well in French data, its usefulness for interpreting data from other countries remains unexplored. I find evidence that the model fails in Colombia because some large firms contradict its assumptions by exhibiting shorter export distances compared to smaller firms in the sample. I hypothesize that these large firms are branches of foreign multinational corporations (MNCs). MNCs’ headquarters constraint the export growth of its affiliates as well as the markets they reach. While I cannot prove firms’ MNC affiliation, I use export sophistication as an imperfect metric to reflect MNC presence. When MNC affiliates are excluded from the sample, firm export distance rises faster with firm size, leading to improved predictions of the distance elasticity of trade in Colombia by the model. These findings have implications not only for the tested model but also for other theories that explain gravity in international trade through firm-level behavior.</p> <p><strong>Chapter 2:</strong> We use a new database of commitments made during the process of ratifying the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) to study variation in countries’ commitment behavior. The TFA is a novel World Trade Organization agreement because it allows developing countries to select commitments from a menu of best practices in trade facilitation, rather than to consent, or not, to a comprehensive package of negotiated commitments. The operation of this <em>à la carte</em> approach to concluding trade agreements is worthy of study in its own right, but the commitment data also offer a high-level description of progress in an international effort to improve border management procedures around the globe. Our study uses data on TFA commitments to describe progress across subcomponents of the agreement. A regression model shows that the number of Type A trade facilitation commitments that a country made in the TFA ratification process depends on its level of development, population size, ability to control corruption, and foreign aid received to support trade facilitation. We use multidimensional scaling techniques to study differences in the content of national commitment bundles. This approach demonstrates that variation in the content of countries’ commitments is closely tied to the number of commitments made.</p> <p><strong>Chapter 3:</strong> This chapter examines the implementation progress of the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) from 2019 to 2023. The TFA, which is the latest World Trade Organization agreement, came into force in 2017. In its novelty, it allows developing countries to set their own implementation schedule and adjust it if needed. This flexibility aligns implementation requirements with the capabilities of signatory countries, but introduces uncertainties in achieving complete global implementation and fully realizing the potential benefits of the agreement. Using data on the notified implementation dates for each measure of the TFA, this study describes the progress made in implementing different subcomponents of the agreement over a period of five years. A regression analysis suggests that the annual rate of progress towards achieving full TFA implementation does not vary based on country characteristics such as GDP per capita, population size, or landlocked status. Assuming that the tendency at which countries implement measures remains unchanged, I project that 95% of developing countries will achieve 95% TFA implementation between the years 2036 and 2047.</p>

La participation juridique des Etats d’Afrique de l’Ouest au commerce international se traduit par l’instauration d’accords régionaux internes et externes et par leur adhésion au système multilatéral de l’OMC. Les Etats se retrouvent donc confrontés à différents engagements juridiques simultanément et cela pose le problème de leur capacité en tant que pays en développement ou PMA à y faire face. Aujourd’hui le développement de ces Etats est au coeur de toutes les négociations commerciales que ce soit dans la cadre des nouveaux accords de partenariat économique ou celui du cycle de Doha. Mais toutes ces négociations sont dans une impasse et cela favorise le développement des accords régionaux internes. Cette étude porte sur les différents processus d’interaction qui peuvent intervenir entre le régionalisme et le multilatéralisme. L’efficacité des différents accords commerciaux mises en place par les Etats ouest Africains suppose une cohérence et une compatibilité entre eux. / The legal participation of the States of West Africa to international trade is reflected by the establishment of internal and external regional agreements and their accession to the WTO multilateral system. States are therefore facing individual legal commitments simultaneously and this raises the problem of their capacity as developing countries or LDCs to cope. Today the development of these States is at the heart of all trade negotiations in the framework of the new agreements economic partnership or one of the Doha round. But all these negotiations are at an impasse and it promotes the development of internal regional agreements. This study focuses on the various processes of interaction that can occur between regionalism and multilateralism. The effectiveness of the various trade agreements put in place by States West Africans assumes coherence and compatibility between them.