Asymmetric bargaining and development trade-offs in the CARIFORUM-European Union Economic Partnership Agreement

On 15 October 2008, CARIFORUM became the first region among the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries to sign a ‘full’ Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union (EU). Although the EPA process has generated widespread critical commentary, few analysts have stopped to consider the motives of individual ACP countries and regions in their approach to the talks. In this article we consider the question of motives in relation to the CARIFORUM-EU EPA. Specifically, it asks why did CARIFORUM feel it necessary or desirable to sign a ‘full’ EPA, containing numerous provisions not actually mandated by the WTO, when the rest of the ACP was content to sign far less ambitious ‘goods only’ interim agreements? In order to address this question, the article goes beyond the extant EU-ACP trade literature to build on wider international political economy (IPE) scholarship, which has analysed the actions of developing countries in relation to a whole range of ‘WTO-plus’ North–South regional and bilateral FTAs. On this basis, the article stands back from the complex details of the agreement to analyse its wider significance, especially in terms of the presumed trade-off between the immediate economic benefits of improved and more secure market access, against the longer term costs of sacrificing the regulatory autonomy, or policy space, deemed necessary to pursue the type of trade and industrial policies deployed successfully in the past by both developed and (some) developing countries. Put simply, the article seeks to ascertain why ultimately CARIFORUM signed an agreement, what it gained from the negotiations and at what cost.