About This Archive
Global Trade Day is a reference archive on international trade agreements and trade policy, and a record of the global day of action held on 18 April 2015.
Scope
Two things sit side by side here, and they are useful for different reasons.
The reference side covers the major trade and investment agreements of the past decade: what each contains, where it stands, and which chapters remain unratified. It is written for readers who need the status of an agreement and the mechanism behind a dispute, not a position on either. That means stating a partial status as partial. An agreement that is provisionally applied in most chapters and unratified in the rest is neither in force nor dead, and rounding it to either is the most common error in secondary summaries of these treaties.
The archive side is the register of 753 events filed across 47 countries for 18 April 2015, kept as primary material rather than summarised into a narrative. A summary of that day would be a few hundred words and would delete the part that carries the information — which cities, in which countries, described how, by people writing in their own language. The register is published unabridged for that reason.
Editorial Rules
These are the rules the material on this site is held to, and they are stated because a reader has no way to check them from the outside.
- Records are not translated, normalised or abridged. Only stray spacing left by the original submission form is tidied.
- Nothing in a record is inferred. Where a field was left empty at submission it stays empty; a country is never deduced from an event title, and a city is never supplied because a title mentions one. An inference reads exactly like a recorded fact once it is in the table.
- Figures are computed from the register at build time rather than typed in, so the counts on every page agree with the table and cannot drift apart as records are corrected.
- Where the status of an agreement is disputed or partial, it is described as partial rather than rounded to in force or dead.
- Dates attached to historical events are the dates of those events. Nothing is back-dated and nothing is presented as more recent than it is.
- The 2015 call and the positions of its signatories are described in the third person and quoted as documents. Their arguments are reported, never restated here as this archive's own.
How the Reference Is Kept Current
The two halves of this site age at completely different rates, and are maintained accordingly.
The register does not age. It is a record of a single day in 2015, closed by the fact that the day has passed, and the only changes it takes are corrections to entries that were transcribed wrongly. A register that grew would no longer be a record of what was filed.
The agreements reference does age, and unevenly. Ratification of an outstanding chapter can happen years after signature and rarely makes news outside the country doing it, so the status column is the part of this site most likely to fall behind. It is written as a state rather than a date for exactly that reason: a status of provisional stays true across a long window, where a bare date invites a reader to assume nothing has moved since.
Where a figure appears in the prose it is either computed from the register or tied to a dated public act — a signature, an entry into force, a formal withdrawal of a mandate. Nothing here is stated as current without one of those two things behind it.
Corrections
Two kinds of correction are worth making, and they have different consequences.
The first is an error in the register: a record filed under the wrong country, a date or time that does not match the original submission, or a title garbled in transcription. A record is identified by its country and city together, since neither is unique on its own — the register holds several entries for the same city and hundreds for the same country. Correcting one record changes every figure on the site that counts it, because those figures are computed rather than stored.
The second is a change in the standing of an agreement: ratification of a chapter, entry into force, suspension, or the opening of a new negotiation affecting anything on the agreements reference. These change more often than the register does. Ratification in particular arrives chapter by chapter and parliament by parliament rather than as a single announcement, which is why the status column is written as a state rather than a date.
What will not be changed is the content of a record. The register reproduces what was filed, including entries for events that may not have gone ahead, because the filing is what was recorded and no cancellation was ever noted. Removing or rewriting an entry would make the register a reconstruction rather than a record.
Questions About This Archive
What does this archive cover?
Two things: a reference on the major trade and investment agreements of the past decade — what each contains and where its ratification stands — and the register of 753 events filed across 47 countries for the global day of action on 18 April 2015.
Is the register still being added to?
No. It records a single day in 2015 and is closed by the fact that the day has passed. The only changes it takes are corrections to entries that were transcribed wrongly; a register that grew would no longer be a record of what was filed.
How is a single record identified for a correction?
By its country and city together. Neither is unique on its own — the register holds several entries for the same city and hundreds for the same country. Correcting one record changes every figure on the site that counts it, because those figures are computed rather than stored.
How current is the status of each agreement?
The status column is written as a state rather than a date, because ratification arrives chapter by chapter and parliament by parliament rather than as one announcement. A status of provisionally applied stays true across a long window, where a bare date invites the assumption that nothing has moved since.