RECONCILING BILATERALISM AND MULTILATERAL NORMS: WTO NON DISCRIMINATION PRINCIPLES AND THE BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE

This paper examines the legal conflicts between China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the important non-discrimination regimes of the World Trade Organization (WTO): the Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) and the National Treatment (NT). The bilateral deals that have come with the BRI, as much as they are directed towards developing world-wide infrastructure and trade, have not necessarily contributed to transparency and homogeneity with the result that they have been problematic to the multilateral system that is characterized by the WTO. The qualitative Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was used to analyse six main academic sources, to detect common legal trends in order to identify common trends over time in literature, such as informality, bilateral asymmetry, and regulatory divergence. Findings denote that the BRI contracts very often meet the provisions of WTO, and very current possibilities of legal congruence appear. Legal predictability within the framework of BRI is able to be achieved to an extent that includes WTO-compatible provisions and dispute settlement mechanisms into BRI templates, which can then enforce policy coherence. In concluding its research, the authors find that simply accepting the status quo of legal innovation and institutional compatibility will help put the BRI in a position compatible and not competitive with multilateral trade governance.