Kazakhstan at Last Stage in WTO Membership

After nearly two decades of negotiations, Kazakhstan completed talks to become the WTO’s 162nd member on 10 June. The draft of the accession package will now go to the Working Party tasked with the negotiations for approval on 22 June, marking one of the last stages in the process.

The process for bringing Kazakstan into the organisation required overcoming various hurdles, particularly in areas such as agricultural subsidies, trade-related investment measures, tariff adjustments affecting the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), and sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS), which involve food safety and plant and animal health.

Eurasian Economic Union

Kazakhstan is part of the Eurasian Economic Union, a regional bloc that also includes Armenia, Belarus, and Russia. The EEU, which has been in force since January of this year, builds off a previous customs union that was formed in 2010 between Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia.

While Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia briefly attempted in 2009 to pursue WTO accession jointly as a customs union, they then decided that same year to continue their accession talks on individual tracks.

Russia and Armenia are currently the only countries from the newly-formed EEU to be WTO members. While Armenia has been part of the WTO since 2003, Russia only joined three years ago, with its membership taking effect in August 2012 following nearly two decades of protracted negotiations.

Tariff liberalisation is a key component of WTO accession talks. Along with negotiating multilaterally with existing members at the Working Party level, any country aiming to join the global trade body must also hold bilateral talks with any individual members that express interest in additional market access concessions or commitments. These must then be extended to all other WTO members in the final accession package.