Author: Ann Capling, University of Melbourne

Ten years after its launch, the Doha Round is now on the brink of failure.  At a key meeting in Geneva last Friday, members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreed that the negotiations could no longer continue in their current form.

WTO Director General Pascal Lamy will now undertake consultations at the ministerial level and report back to WTO membership at the end of May about the next steps.   Read more…

Author: Ann Capling, University of Melbourne

At last week’s APEC meeting, United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk announced that the Obama Administration would participate in negotiations to establish a new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. This announcement means that the TPP negotiations – involving Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam – will now go forward, with the first round of negotiations to be held in Australia in early 2010.

The TPP is intended to be a high quality, comprehensive regional trade agreement that is consistent with APEC and WTO principles. Read more…

Author: Ann Capling, University of Melbourne

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have proliferated rapidly over the past fifteen years, with more than 200 in force and many more under negotiation. It is widely agreed that PTAs are a bad way to organize world trade: their inherent discrimination is economically inefficient and they are especially disadvantageous to poor countries which lack the leverage to do good deals with more powerful trade partners.

Despite these problems, PTAs are here to stay and even if the Doha Round of WTO negotiations is eventually concluded they will continue to multiply. Throughout this process the WTO has been an ‘innocent bystander’ but should the WTO membership continue to stand idly by, the multilateral trade system will be further eroded.

This was the blunt message delivered by Richard Baldwin at a recent symposium on ‘multilateralising regionalism’. One of the world’s foremost trade economists, Baldwin has written extensively on the causes of PTAs and on the steps that could be taken to ‘tame the tangle’ of preferential trade agreements. In his address, he urged Australia to be in the forefront of advancing this agenda. Australia could do this in two important ways: first, by making its own PTAs as WTO-friendly as possible, and second, by pushing the WTO to engage with the challenge of regionalism.

Read more…