Technical barriers to trade for the importation of Australian veterinary biological vaccines to the European Union

Technical barriers to trade are product health and safety related regulations imposed by governments to restrict or control the inflow and outflow of particular products. This thesis begins with a brief review of governments' sovereign rights in the context of international standards to be adopted in restricting or controlling market access to specific products. This is followed by an analysis of the multilateral regulatory environment under the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) agreements, with particular emphasis on GATT (1994) Article XX and the Agreements on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures and the Technical Barriers to Trade. This analysis aims to assist a better understanding of the new global trade order under the WTO regime as it deals with the contradiction between safety concerns versus market access and trade liberalisation. The thesis then examines in detail the various European Union (EU) regulations as they relate to veterinary biological vaccines and the requirements for Australian products to be allowed into EU markets. The bureaucratic requirements of such regulations appear to protect domestic producers from foreign competition, by, at the very least, frustrating market access through a myriad of committees and technical requirements designed to retard market penetration. The EU regulations, therefore, appear to have negatively impacted on trade flows. The Australian market is typically oligopolistic in structure and significant foreign take-over of domestic production in the 1990's, has reduced Australia's ownership in domestic production of veterinary biological vaccines. Given this circumstance it is unlikely that the Australian government would invest significant resources investigating the likelihood of a challenge to the EU through the WTO dispute mechanism