EU and South Korea open trade

According to Phillip Whyte, a senior research fellow with the London-based Centre for European Reform, the bilateral agreement represents only the second best option for the two sides after multilateral trade talks between the World Trade Organisation and its member countries began to slow more than a decade ago. "The problem economists have with these regional trade agreements is they're becoming a replacement for multilateral agreements You're seeing a spaghetti bowl of individual bilateral agreements, much like this one, and they sort of cut across each other. The commission thinks the best chance of securing further trade liberalisation is by focusing on smaller, bilateral regional agreements. So in a sense, the impetus you see for taking the regional track is a symptom of the weakness in the multilateral system."