Jointly implemented by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the RTA Exchange works in the interest of the sharing of ideas, experiences to date and best practices to harvest innovation from RTAs and leverage lessons learned towards progress at the multilateral level. This paper examines the opportunity that regulatory cooperation provides to rationalise the array of overlapping international regulatory systems going forward, and the role that trade agreements can play to facilitate this occurring, particularly with regard to lessons learned from the Canada-US regulatory cooperation effort. In so doing, the paper outlines the context for cooperation between regulators, the important role for stakeholders, the approach to regulatory cooperation planning, and potential trade agreement implications.
Written by Robert Carberry