Preferential trade arrangements of the EU: a non-systematic glance at the current non-uniformity

Taking a look back over the last couple of years – more precisely 15, when the WTO’s Doha Round was expected to end in 2005 – economic operators were facing the results of a multilateral approach to facilitate global trade which clearly lagged behind its actual intentions. As regards preferential trade, the major challenge for economic operators in these times seemed to have been the confrontation with the strengthening of individual national proceedings resulting in more and more bilateral and partially plurilateral trade agreements. The spaghetti bowl was no longer a valued Italian ‘secondo piatto’ but a feared opaque and impenetrable mass of regulations of many different free trade agreements. As we know, this situation has not changed much since then – so companies simply got used to the fact that the exploitation of potential preferential benefits is bound to the prior analysis of the (preferential) trade relations of their destination market countries – bilaterally but also among each other. They cannot count on the advantages of a multilateral agreement with lowered or abolished tariff rates and harmonised rules.