Posts tagged…Doha
The end of the Doha Round
Sun, Jun 01 2008The Doha Round of WTO trade negotiations is entering its final agony. It may be time to start spreading the blame.
The draft agreements circulated in late May are lame (agriculture) or empty (services) or unable to bridge sharp disagreement (NAMA, rules). The enterprise was weakened by the disinterest of the Bush administration for most of the last seven years, and by the arrival of new management…
Read more…WTO’s explanation of the 08-02-08 Agriculture text
Tue, Feb 19 2008The compromise draft issued by the negotiating group chairman is more than a ‘text’: after 7 years, this is, for the first time, an attempt at coherent proposals couched in the language of an agreeement. This summary, prepared by journalists in the WTO’s Information Division, makes the text almost comprehensible.
The main purpose of this note is to walk you through the revised draft text…
WTO agriculture proposals probably fall short of substantial improvements
Sat, Feb 09 2008After six years of negotiation, the latest compromise from the Chair of the negotiating group is a complex package whose main strengths are that it includes ‘across the board’ cuts in bound rates of duty on agricultural imports and an effective elimination of export subsidies. Still, border barriers are so high that these cuts look unlikely to bring about the ‘substantial improvements in market…
What the collapse of the Doha talks means for agreement on climate
Tue, Jun 26 2007
The news that the WTO talks had collapsed again probably deserves the familiar gripes and even the bored yawns that greeted it. But behind this story is a worrying lesson about the potential for agreement on other global challenges, like climate change.
Ignoring the WTO jargon, the collapse of the talks is a story about how the world has changed in the past half century or so since the WTO rules…