‘New age’ PTAs tend to be preferential. They contain provisions that go well beyond goods trade and, in principle, many of these provisions (such as governing intellectual property and competition policy) could be liberalised on a non-preferential basis. But in practice, recent PTAs have tended to do one of two things in the new age areas – either bind the status quo, or make concessions on a preferential basis, even when logic suggests they could sensibly be made non-preferentially.3 One very clear reason for this outcome is that countries that have strong ‘offensive’ interests in the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations are unlikely to give away negotiating coin by making defensive concessions on a non-preferential basis within a PTA, prior to a Doha Round settlement