디지털무역 규범 이행에 대한 법경제학적 분석

Economic Analysis on Implementation of Digital Trade Rules

Sectoral agreements between like-minded countries have gained popularity recently due to the necessity to regulate new trade issues such as digital, supply chain, and clean energy in timely-manner, the decline of free trade, and a new cold war between the U.S. and China. Sectoral agreements have comparative advantages over comprehensive trade agreements as they can respond flexibly to rapidly changing trade environments and will be faced with less political burdens. However, these comparative advantages, at the same time, will lead to structural problems especially on ensuring implementations of sectoral agreements, given the absence of market access for goods and services and sophisticated dispute settlement mechanisms. Considering that these structural problems may substantially undermine the durability of sectoral agreements, it is, therefore, of importance to review ways to tackle these structural problems. In this vein, this paper carefully examines the structural problems of sectoral agreements by focusing on rapidly evolving digital trade rules. To begin with, this paper establishes an implementation model for trade agreements, and then points out that under-compliance issues be arisen if there is no implementation mechanism. After that, this paper conducts an economic analysis on retaliation, compensation, reputation cost, and implementation incentive in order to find ways to ensure internationally optimal implementations of digital trade rules and derive legal implications.