World Trade Organisations and trade-creep in Health and Social Policies
International Trade Agreements are an importannt part of globalisation in setting out rules and entitlements for trade practices at the global level and may have direct or indirect implications to health and social policies. A major share of implications is based on contents of agreements and what these imply to poverty, income distribution and food security in the global scene. However, in addition to these, implicqtions interfering with the content and scope of of health and social poicies across countries may be elaborated. These implications of international trade agreements have emerged only gradually and in many cases through the settlement of trade-related disputes between countries or through debates concerning interpretations of stipulations made. In the World trade Organisation social and health policies are simply assumed to benefit from economic growth. Thinking about social policies is based on residual assumptions of social welfare. WTO agreements are not geared towards taking into account issues of social redistribution or productive methods and processes. At the same time trade-policies seem to influence more how countries implement health and social policies. The process of extension of trade-related rules to govern the field of health policies can be understood as trade creep. Trade-creep emerges especially in areas such as 1] broad public health policies with implications for consumption and marketing of goods [eg. tobacco control]; 2] health and safety regulations in general as well as those relating to the marketing and availability of pharmeceuticals and health technologies; and 3] health services provision especially cost-containment practices and policies for ensuring equitable access.
It is clear that the WTO Agreements and practices need to be corrected to respect other than trade arms in societies. In the global contet attention has so far been drawn predominantly to interests of countries, however it may well be that the systematic imacts of trade-creep in relation to differential interests of private corporate sector and public policies in antional and transnational scenes may well be of equal relevance. This means that trade and investment agreements need to be reviewed in relation to their potential systematic implications to social, health and enviromental policies accross countries. Thus, essential elements of the agreements may not be reduced to national interest and require renewed focus on public governance both at national and international levels.
The issue is not whether to have global trade rules, but rather what kind of rules and how they should be balanced to ensure that they do not engender adverse incentives impacting upon the social, health and enviromental spheres nor iniquities in terms of the distributional impacts. In the global governance this implies an icreased role and attention to the United Nations and its specialised agencies on issue specific areas. In health and social policies this requires clearly strengthening the cpacities, public accountabiltiy and independence of World Health Organisation, Food and Agriculture Organisation, International Labor Organisation and UN Social and Economic Commission as knowledge-based global actors and ensuring that the WTO takes fully into account their work on social and health policies.