Rules of Origin

FTA / RoO

Criteria used to determine the national source of a product for applying FTA preferential tariff rates.

Sources

1. World Trade Organization — Rules of origin wto.org accessed 17 September 2026

The WTO’s formulation is the compact one: “Rules of origin are the criteria needed to determine the national source of a product.” What that understates is how much rides on the answer. The same organisation lists what non-preferential origin is used for — implementing commercial-policy instruments such as anti-dumping duties and safeguard measures; determining whether goods receive most-favoured-nation or preferential treatment; trade statistics; labelling and marking requirements; and government procurement. Origin is therefore not one determination but a single fact that several separate regimes each read for their own purposes.

These words are the WTO’s own explanatory text, not the agreement itself: the treaty PDFs on wto.org are closed to automated retrieval, so nothing here is presented as a quotation from a treaty article.

Related terms

• Absorption Principle
• Bilateral Cumulation
• Certificate of Origin
• Change in Tariff Classification
• Cumulation
• Diagonal Cumulation

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).