It is, however, debatable whether such agreements should be enforced with trade sanctions. However, it is hard to see why such matters belong at the WTO , since these are mainly disputes about the environment, not trade. Weak intellectual-property standards can harm trade. If Hong Kong is awash with bootleg Madonna CD s, imports of the genuine article may suffer. If enough countries do this, little innovation will take place.
International standards help overcome such problems.
Trade sanctions are fairly useful for enforcing intellectual-property standards, since the commercial damage imposed by illegal copying can be assessed relatively easily. And yet, and yet. Raising intellectual-property standards is fundamentally different from lowering trade barriers. The beauty of trade liberalisation is that all countries gain the liberalising country most of all. Suppose poor countries were obliged to extend the validity of patents from five years to 20.