This article was first published by the Hinrich Foundation.
On 10 February, Hinrich Foundation Founder and Chairman Merle A. Hinrich proposed a very useful set of seven principles for the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) reform. Yet, even if reform is desperately needed at the WTO, it is unlikely to materialize soon as the deepening geopolitical fractures make reaching consensus among the WTO’s 166 members particularly difficult. The WTO can only make agreements by “the practice of consensus.”
Still, the WTO could begin rebuilding trust immediately — without amending a single comma of its rulebook — by strengthening transparency.
Transparency obligations at the WTO (see Box 1 below) suffer from chronic under-compliance. At the same time, the WTO Secretariat has very limited capacity to generate information given that its members fail to provide it. Yet the exchange of reliable information is fundamental to legal certainty and predictability for business and governments alike.
Much of the missing information, in reality, could be gathered through closer cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Such closer cooperation simply isn’t being sufficiently deployed right now.
Both the IMF and the World Bank maintain Resident Representatives, Regional Offices, and Country Offices around the world, staffed by economists and specialists who engage continuously with national authorities. IMF staff conduct regular surveillance of macroeconomic policies, while World Bank teams monitor the implementation of development projects. Together, they possess a detailed, on-the-ground understanding of WTO member countries’ economic policies.
These offices are well-positioned to collect and share relevant data on tariff and non-tariff trade measures across the WTO’s membership. Leveraging this resource would primarily require deeper and more structured cooperation between these multilateral institutions.
The IMF already produces two annual surveillance reports that serve this purpose. Article IV consultations — annual dialogues of IMF technical staff with country authorities — culminate in published Article IV Reports. The IMF External Sector Reports, also published annually, provide multilaterally consistent assessments of external positions of the world’s largest economies, representing over 90% of global gross domestic product.
Importantly, these reports are prepared under the responsibility of IMF technical staff and cannot be modified by governments or the Fund’s Executive Board, except under very limited circumstances.1
Together, these surveillance reports provide a ready-made channel for disseminating reliable information on trade-related measures adopted by the IMF’s 191 members, significantly strengthening the WTO’s monitoring capacity over its 166 members.
Further steps could deepen this cooperation. WTO staff could be invited to participate (even remotely, hence at virtually no cost) in trade-related discussions during IMF annual Article IV consultations. Conversely, IMF and World Bank resident representatives could systematically share trade-relevant information with WTO staff conducting Trade Policy Reviews (see Box 1). Such cross-institution participation would promote multilateral coherence, reduce information gaps, and reinforce the global economic governance system without the need to create new mandates or new bureaucratic structures.
No institutional changes would be required. The IMF2 and the World Bank3 already have formal cooperation agreements with the WTO. Moreover, Article III:5 of the Marrakesh Agreement explicitly calls for cooperation among these institutions to achieve “greater coherence in global economic policy-making”. Consequently, the steps outlined here could be implemented through administrative decisions by the WTO’s Director-General, the IMF’s Managing Director, and the World Bank’s President — without requiring consensus (in practice at and by the WTO, the requirement for consensus is interpreted, potentially wrongly, as a requirement for unanimity in the body’s decision-making) at the WTO’s General Council.
The four levels of transparency in the WTO system
- General Publication Obligations
Article X of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (with parallel provisions in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)) requires members to publish trade measures promptly. However, governments can disregard this foundational obligation without meaningful consequences. - Specific Notification Obligations
Most WTO agreements include detailed notification requirements. For example, under the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), members must notify draft regulations that deviate from international standards. Under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM), members must regularly notify subsidy programs. Compliance remains uneven, particularly regarding subsidies, where chronic under-reporting persists. - General Monitoring of Trade Measures
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, the WTO Secretariat has produced periodic monitoring reports identifying restrictive and facilitating trade measures. Furthermore, in cooperation with UN Trade and Development and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the WTO Secretariat also contributes to “Trade and investment Measures” monitoring reports for the Group of Twenty. - The Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM)
Established in Annex 3 of the WTO Agreement, the TPRM provides structured peer review of members’ trade policies.
Conclusion
The WTO faces what is often framed as a “reform or perish” dilemma. Yet in times of geopolitical fragmentation, institutional ambition must be matched with institutional pragmatism. Comprehensive WTO reform would require a self-imposed threshold of unanimity — rather than a looser construct of consensus — that appears politically out of reach at the WTO’s next ministerial conference in late March in Cameroon.4
Rebuilding trust in the WTO, however, does not necessarily require reopening negotiated texts, but it does require restoring credibility to its existing functions.
Transparency is not a peripheral technical matter. It is the foundation of predictability and confidence in rules-based cooperation. While the WTO’s transparency requirements are already extensive on paper, they remain weakened by chronic under-notification and limited Secretariat capacity.
Rather than waiting for unanimity-based reform, WTO members could strengthen monitoring by leveraging the comparative advantages of institutions that already possess global field presence, technical expertise, and structured surveillance mechanisms. Systematic cooperation with the IMF and the World Bank would not alter their mandates or dilute competencies; it would simply operationalize the existing coherence mandate that the Marrakesh Agreement envisaged.
Enhancing transparency through administrative coordination would send a powerful signal: multilateralism remains alive and capable of adaptation even when formal rule-making is stalled. At a moment when the rules-based order faces mounting skepticism, the most effective reform may be the simplest one — making information on trade-related measures more complete, more reliable, and more visible.
If consensus on new rules is elusive, consensus on better information should not be.
