Global Trade Explained: Agreements, Policy and Tariffs Worldwide
Global trade runs on a stack of treaties that most people never read. This archive sets out what each of the major agreements actually does, where it stands today, and how the machinery of trade policy and tariffs fits together.
Two things sit side by side here. The first is a plain reference on global trade agreements — who signed what, when it entered into force, and which chapters remain unratified. The second is a historical record: the register of 753 local events filed across 47 countries for the day of action on 18 April 2015, kept as primary material rather than summarised away. Each agreement is explained on its own terms, with the status stated as it actually stands rather than rounded off.
Global Trade Agreements Explained, and Where Each One Stands
Six agreements account for most of the argument about global trade over the past decade. Their fates diverged sharply: two never made it out of negotiation, one was rebuilt without its largest member, and three are in force. Each is explained below in terms of what it covers and how far it got.
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
European Union and United States. Talks opened in July 2013 and ran to 2016; the Council declared the negotiating mandates obsolete in April 2019.
Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement
European Union and Canada. Signed in October 2016 and provisionally applied since September 2017; the investment-court chapters await full ratification.
Trade in Services Agreement
A plurilateral negotiation among roughly two dozen WTO members. The last round was held in late 2016 and no further round has been scheduled.
Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership
Eleven Pacific economies. Rebuilt after the United States withdrew from the original TPP in 2017; signed in March 2018 and in force since December 2018.
United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement
Replaced NAFTA on 1 July 2020, adding labour and automotive rules-of-origin chapters and a rapid-response labour mechanism.
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
Fifteen Asia-Pacific economies including the ASEAN members, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. In force since January 2022.
The full agreements reference, with the pros and cons of each
How Trade Policy Is Actually Made
Trade policy is negotiated by executives and ratified by legislatures, which is the root of most disputes about it. The sequence below is the one every agreement on this site went through, and each stage answers a different question about who is allowed to see the text.
- Negotiating mandate agreed
- Rounds held in confidence
- Consolidated text published
- Signature
- Ratification by each parliament
- Entry into force
A mandate is agreed first, often without a published text. Rounds then run for years behind closed doors, on the argument that disclosed positions cannot be traded away. Only at the third stage does the full text reach the parliaments that must approve it — which is why transparency became the central demand of the 2015 mobilisation rather than any single clause. By the time a text is public, the negotiation is over and the choice in front of a legislature is the whole agreement or none of it.
Ratification is rarely a single event either. CETA has been provisionally applied since 2017 while its investment chapters wait on national parliaments, so parts of the same treaty are simultaneously in force and not in force. The last two stages can therefore be true of different chapters of one agreement at the same time, which is why this reference states a status per agreement rather than a date.
Agreements can also outlive their own dispute machinery. The WTO Appellate Body lost its quorum at the end of 2019, which left the organisation's binding appeal stage inoperative and pushed disputes toward the procedures written into individual agreements — the same investment and arbitration chapters that were the most contested part of the negotiations a few years earlier.
Tariffs, and What Sits Behind Them
A tariff is a duty charged when goods cross a border, set as a percentage of value or as a fixed amount per unit. Tariffs are the most visible instrument of trade policy and, in the agreements above, usually the least contested — many industrial tariffs between developed economies were already low before these talks began.
The harder chapters are the non-tariff ones, and each is explained in the section that follows. Rules of origin decide how much of a product must be made inside the bloc to qualify for its tariff treatment, which is why the USMCA automotive rules were fought over line by line. Regulatory cooperation determines whose standards apply. Investment protection determines who adjudicates when a government's decision costs a foreign investor money. Tariffs are the headline; these decide the outcome.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a free trade agreement?
A treaty between two or more economies that lowers the barriers to trade between them. The obvious barriers are tariffs — the duties charged at a border — but most modern agreements spend far more text on non-tariff matters: which standards each side will recognise, how services and public procurement are opened, how intellectual property is enforced, and how disputes are settled.
Why did TTIP attract so much opposition?
Three things concentrated it. The negotiating texts were not public, so the substance was known mainly through leaks. The agreement proposed regulatory cooperation between two large blocs with different approaches to precaution, which critics read as pressure on the stricter side. And the investor-state dispute settlement chapter would have let foreign investors bring claims against governments outside the domestic courts.
What is ISDS, and what replaced it in CETA?
Investor-state dispute settlement lets an investor sue a host state before an arbitral tribunal rather than in that state's courts. After sustained criticism of the ad-hoc arbitration model, the European Union moved in CETA to an Investment Court System with a standing roster of publicly appointed adjudicators and an appeal stage.
Which agreements are still being negotiated today?
Of the six on this site, none is in active negotiation. Three are in force (CPTPP, USMCA, RCEP), one is provisionally applied with chapters outstanding (CETA), one is stalled with no round scheduled (TiSA) and one was formally closed in 2019 (TTIP). New negotiations since then have been narrower and mostly bilateral rather than bloc-to-bloc.