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The convention of reciprocity has undoubtedly played a large role in the history of trade relations.
In bilateral trade negotiations, negotiators have often directly compared, product by product, the size of
the tariff cuts and the volume of trade involved in order to assure themselves of equivalence. But this
certainly is not an exact and faithful characterization of multilateral trade negotiations witnessed in the
more recent past. Finger, Reincke and Castro (2002) demonstrated this very clearly for the Uruguay
Round. In the tariff negotiations, they found no evidence that countries had sought to negotiate equivalent
gains in market access if equivalence is understood in any precise, quantitative sense. Comparing
changes in ad valorem tariffs (using dT/(1+T) as a meaningful measure), they found for their sample that
the tariff reductions given and received by individual countries did not correspond. For example, India
and South Korea gave their trading partners reductions that amounted to 6.16 percent and 5.99 percent
while the reductions they received were 1.22 percent and 1.87 percent. Moreover, when the tariff cuts for
the sample of countries were multiplied by the value of the imports or exports to which the cuts applied
— a measure of the gains in market access — numerous countries recorded large imbalances. This lack
of equivalence might, of course, have been lessened or made greater if we could include the potential
gains in market access resulting from the liberalization of trade in services, and from the revisions or
introduction of several rules that affected market access.

Nonetheless, it can reasonably be argued that, in recent negotiations among the developed
countries, a rough sense of equivalence could be perceived to have guided them even if there was no close
accounting of the gains in market access. In each of the major areas of negotiation, the mutual
concessions among these countries were roughly comparable. In tariffs, for example, though the average
reduction was not exactly the same, the differences were not large (since tariff levels were already low).
Likewise, in the service industries, what negotiators sought was national treatment in each other’s
markets, and it could well be argued that, since firms in all these countries were more or less equally able
to make gains in the others’ markets, the potential gains in market access were comparable. Much the
same could also be said of the changes made in rules such as technical barriers to trade, which affect
market access.

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