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WTO Accession and Economic Development: Experience of Newly Acceded Countries and Implications for Belarus

1 "WTO Accession and Economic Development: Experience of Newly Acceded Countries and Implications for Belarus" is available under the Creative Commons License 3.0. Some rights reserved to the Solidarity Fund. The paper was written under the " Democracy Support Programme " funded by the Polish Development Cooperation Programme of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2013). It is permitted to use any part of the paper, on condition that the full information on the rights holder and the Polish Development Cooperation program are provided. Following Russia's accession to the WTO, Belarus, as a member of the Customs Union, has faced the need of forced trade liberalization. Furthermore, its market is becoming more open to imports from third countries and exporters are experiencing increased competition in the Russian market. However, unlike the situation in Russia, this process is not accompanied by improved access to markets of third countries and other preferences granted to members of the WTO. In this context, in November 2012, Belarusian government renewed the negotiations regarding the accession to the WTO that were suspended in 2005. Therefore, the issues of optimizing the negotiation process and evaluating possible impact of institutional reforms associated with the accession to the WTO are of particular relevance. The reason for this is that the WTO regulates all areas related to the international trade 2 , which in its turn inevitably influences internal regulations and institutions. Since liberalization processes in Belarus are at their nascent stage, implementation of respective reforms would undoubtedly become one of the main requirements of the country's WTO accession. From this point of view, the analysis of experience of the countries which have recently joined the WTO would be especially useful. The paper is organized as follows. The second part of the paper presents the literature review-based on a posteriori assessment of impact of the WTO accession on economic development and institutions. The third part analyzes the experiences of the WTO member-states, which have recently acceded the organization from the point of view of institutional reforms implemented by them. It also provides the evaluation of the impact of these changes on further development of the countries. The final part concludes with a possible strategy of the WTO accession for Belarus based on the experience of the newly acceded countries. 2 Assessing the impact of the WTO on the economic development of member countries 2.1 Accession to the WTO: what determines …