There Is No Agreed World Definition of “Made In”. The Programme to Write One Opened in July 1995 and Has Missed Every Deadline Since.

by Marcus Lindqvist · September 8, 2026

Global Economy Reporter, The Globe Ledger

The two words on the back of almost every manufactured object in the world — made in, followed by a country — read like a statement of fact certified somewhere. They are not. They are the output of a legal test, that test differs from country to country, and the international negotiation convened to make it the same everywhere has been running for thirty-one years without finishing.

The subject is rules of origin: the criteria a customs administration uses to decide where a good comes from when it was not wholly produced in one place. They split into two families. Preferential rules decide whether a shipment qualifies for the lower tariff under a particular trade agreement, and they belong to that agreement. Non-preferential rules do everything else. The World Trade Organization's own technical description of its Agreement on Rules of Origin says the agreement “covers only rules of origin used in non-preferential commercial policy instruments, such as MFN treatment, anti-dumping and countervailing duties, safeguard measures” and related purposes — origin marking, quantitative restrictions, government procurement and trade statistics among them. Preferential rules are dealt with separately, in the agreement's Annex II common declaration.

That is the more consequential family, because it decides who an anti-dumping duty falls on, whose quota a consignment counts against, and which flag appears in the trade statistics two governments then argue about. And it is the family the 1995 agreement promised to standardise.

Article 9 of the Agreement on Rules of Origin sets out what the harmonised rules were supposed to look like. They were to be applied equally for all the purposes listed; origin was to be determined either as the country where the good was wholly obtained or, where more than one country was involved, as the country of last substantial transformation; the rules were to be objective, understandable and predictable; they were not to be used as instruments to pursue trade objectives; and they were to be based on positive standards rather than lists of what does not confer origin.

Article 9 also set a clock. The WTO's technical information on rules of origin records that “Article 9:2 provided that the HWP be completed within three years of initiation. Its agreed deadline was July 1998.” The Work Programme for the Harmonization of Non-Preferential Rules of Origin was, in the WTO's words, “officially launched on 20 July 1995 and was scheduled for completion by 20 July 1998.”

July 1998 came and went. The WTO records that in July 1998 the General Council approved a decision whereby “Members have committed themselves to make their best endeavours to complete the Programme by a new target date, November 1999.” Best endeavours is the language of a deadline nobody expects to hold.

It did not hold, and the extensions kept coming. The WTO Analytical Index, the secretariat's own compilation of law and practice under the agreements, records successive General Council extensions: to July 2003, then July 2004, then July 2005, then the end of 2006, then the end of 2007. After that the Analytical Index records no further extension of the deadline.

The reason is visible in a single figure. In July 2002 the chairman of the Committee on Rules of Origin reported to the General Council identifying, in the Analytical Index's account, 94 “core policy issues” for discussion and decision. These were not disputes about coffee or bearings. They were disputes about what a harmonised origin rule would do to the operation of other instruments — whether a single agreed rule would change who an anti-dumping duty could be imposed on, how a safeguard measure would bite, and how easily either could be circumvented by shifting one processing step across a border. The technical work kept running into the policy consequences of its own success.

The scale of the technical work is itself worth stating. The Analytical Index records that the harmonisation programme required agreement on rules for 2,744 products, and that members could reach consensus on 1,528 of them. A presentation given in October 2022 by Darlan F. Martí, secretary of the WTO's Committee on Rules of Origin — and issued with the standard note that it is the author's responsibility and without prejudice to members' positions — puts the same picture differently: “About 70% of all product specific rules had been agreed to,” assembled into “315 pages of a full package: definitions, list of wholly obtained goods, list of substantial transformation criteria for all entire harmonized system (change of tariff classification), primary and residual rules, interpretative notes.” It names the sectors where agreement failed — coffee, fish, certain textile products and machinery.

The institutional machinery is still standing. Technical work sits with the Technical Committee on Rules of Origin at the World Customs Organization in Brussels; the WTO's Committee on Rules of Origin handles the trade-policy side in Geneva; the General Council provides policy guidance when the Committee cannot resolve something. Three bodies, two cities, one unfinished text.

What has been added alongside the stalled negotiation is telling. The Analytical Index records that on 30 October 2014, in the Committee minutes issued as G/RO/M/63, “Members have instructed the Secretariat to organize information sessions as part of an ‘educational exercise’ to better understand the impact that existing non-preferential rules of origin have on international trade and businesses.” The WTO's page on the programme documents one such session, held on 13 October 2022. That instruction is about information sessions; it is not a formal decision closing the Harmonization Work Programme, which the WTO still describes as unfinished rather than abandoned.

Meanwhile the agreement's interim obligations continue to govern. Article 2 — headed, in the agreement's own structure, as disciplines during the transition period — requires members to define clearly what each rule demands, whether that is a change of tariff classification, an ad valorem percentage or a specified manufacturing operation. It requires that “their rules of origin are not used as instruments to pursue trade objectives directly or indirectly,” that rules not be more stringent for imports and exports than for determining whether a good is domestic, that they not discriminate between members, that they be administered consistently, uniformly, impartially and reasonably, that they rest on positive standards, and that “their laws, regulations, judicial decisions and administrative rulings of general application relating to rules of origin are published as if they were subject to, and in accordance with, the provisions of paragraph 1 of Article X of GATT 1994.” Article 2 also gives traders a right to an assessment of the origin of an import, to be issued within 150 days of request and to remain valid for three years so long as the facts and conditions remain comparable, and it bars retroactive application of changes.

Read that list again and note what is missing. Every discipline is about how a member administers its own rules — clearly, publicly, consistently, without discrimination. Not one of them requires two members to reach the same answer about the same consignment. Uniformity was to be delivered by the harmonisation programme, and the harmonisation programme was not completed. The WTO's own account of it says only that “While substantial progress was made in that time in the implementation of the HWP, it could not be completed due to the complexity of issues.”

The agreement's architecture makes the gap explicit: it contains one set of disciplines for the transition period and a separate set for after the transition period, the latter written to apply once the harmonised rules exist. Thirty-one years after the programme opened, the part of the agreement designed for the finished world has never had a world to operate in.

None of which makes the label on the box meaningless. It makes it national. The country named there is the answer produced by whichever authority applied whichever test at whichever border, published in that authority's own tariff schedule and rulings — an administrative determination with a jurisdiction attached, not a fact about the object. The programme that would have made it a fact about the object opened on 20 July 1995, was due on 20 July 1998, and is still open.