Quick reads
Pascal Lamy announces plans to seek an early harvest at the December WTO ministerial meeting on LDC issues like duty-free, quota-free market access and rules of origin. They’ll push tougher issues off...
View ArticleHarvesting early is tough when harvesters disagree
ICTSD: “Doha “Plan B” Hits Early Roadblock“ It is already proving complicated. On Tuesday afternoon, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy postponed a meeting of the Doha Round’s supervisory Trade...
View ArticleUS cotton subsidies causing turmoil
The US House has passed legislation that threatens its WTO-approved agreement with Brazil on cotton subsidies: Questions are being raised about the future of the hard-won US-Brazil cotton agreement,...
View ArticleNon-Doha in December
Pascal Lamy has indicated that the WTO’s December ministerial meeting ought to focus on non-Doha issues, given how badly the negotiations are going. We started this meeting on a sombre note. I do not...
View ArticleSchott on Doha: Too little, too late
Jeff Schott counsels Jagdish Bhagwati against pushing a “Doha lite” deal with what’s currently on the WTO negotiating table.
View ArticleSubramanian proposes a “China round”
Arvind Subramanian (pdf): China has become too economically dominant for the United States to engage with China on its own. That is one of the major changes that has occurred in the world economy over...
View ArticleDoes the DSM need support from ongoing negotiations?
Jeff Schott worries that the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism may be less effective if the dismal prospects for future negotiations cause dispute panels to expand their coverage: Of course, WTO...
View ArticleA decade of Doha
Some highlights from this evening’s discussion of the Doha negotiations at Columbia University: On why it’s called the DDA: “I was facing down a half-dozen trade ministers who said, ‘I stood in my...
View Article“Miserly progress made on Doha trade talks”
Alan Beattie has a long(ish) summary of the Doha round’s dim prospects in the FT. It begins: ”If Charles Dickens wanted a bleak setting for a rewrite of A Christmas Carol, his classic tale of regret...
View ArticleOn the NYT’s “Building Trade Walls”
The Trump administration has certainly increased public discussion of trade policy. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a series of graphics accompanied by a thousand words on “Building Trade Walls” in...
View ArticleIs it easier to liberalize agriculture via bilateral or multilateral deals?
Tyler Cowen’s latest Bloomberg column is about bilateral trade deals. He’s more optimistic than most: The smartest case for trade bilateralism is that trade in many goods is already fairly free, but...
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