คำศัพท์เฉพาะจาAs we mentioned in Chapter 8, “red tape” -bureaucratic measures applied at the border – can limit international trade even when tariffs are low. But when are red tape barriers allowed under international law?
There are some cases in which countries have a clear right to limit the international flow of goods for health and safety reasons. For example, the United States requires fumigation of imported produce to ensure that destructive pests are not introduced to U.S farm. This procedure does not constitute unwarranted interference with trade. Since there is a clear economic justification. The United States even allows individual states such as California to impose similar requirements on shipments of fruits and vegetable from other states, even though the Constitution prohibits restrictions of interstate trade.
Conversely, there are other red tape barriers that are clearly spurious such as the Japanese refusal in the early 1980s to permit importation of U.S aluminum baseball bats on the grounds that they were unsuited to Japanese conditions.
There is, however, an extensive gray area, involving regulations that serve laudable goals through questionable means.
In 1990 the United States tested this gray area when, in response to environmentalist concerns, it banned the import of tuna caught by methods that kill large numbers of dolphins. (In some areas of the Pacific, herds of these intelligent marine mammals on the surface are a sign of schools of tuna below. Encircling the dolphin with large nets is an effective way to catch tuna cheaply, but it kill many dolphin, too.) Mexico, which exports tuna to the United States has no right to use trade policy to impose its environmental standards on other countries.
The legal reasoning behind this decision was clear, yet it left U.S environmentalists understandably upset. (We might note that the moral and even economic case for antidumping duties, yet such duties are an accepted part of international trade law.) It seems likely that there will be future trade policy challenges over a variety of environmental issues, some of them even more compelling for example, can we refuse to import goods whose production endangers the ozone layer? Many experts” issues will be at the top of the agenda in any future world trade negotiations.
กบทความ