Author: Bill Carmichael
The G20 leaders’ commitment of 16 November 2008 to avoid protectionism is not self-fulfilling, and the Vox eBook, if it was designed to help them achieve their goals, has three major shortcomings.
It treats the threat as short-term, offers fleeting recognition that it originates in the domestic policy environment, and offers no response that deals directly with the ongoing domestic causes of protectionism.
The insights offered, it must be said, are good ones. Yet the suggestions made in the eBook to help G20 leaders act against protectionism do not match these insights.
In short, they ignore the domestic source of protectionism and the domestic transparency discipline required to make any multilateral trade negotiations worthwhile.
As Razeen Sally puts it: ‘it is time to make trade policy less of a foreign-policy plaything in far-away international institutions. Instead trade policy should be hitched to domestic economic policy and its institutional framework. It has to be grounded in bread-and-butter domestic reforms’.
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Author: Bill Carmichael, Former Chairman, Industries Assistance Commission
In introducing the recent Australian Financial Review editorial on trade policy, Denis Hussey suggested there is scope for improving the performance of our own economy. This raises important questions about the future of the advisory process that has, to date, underpinned bipartisan support for micro-economic reform in Australia.
Given the broad bipartisan agreement about the need to raise national productivity, there is an obvious need for continuity in the conduct of micro-economic reform. It is the driver of national productivity gains and has long-term ramifications throughout the economy and community.
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Authors : Bill Carmichael, Saul Eslake, Charles Finny, Roger Kerr
Governments around the world have done little to explore ways of protecting future international trade negotiations against the developments that have stalled progress in the Doha Round. There are, however, two possible exceptions: the Australian government and the incoming New Zealand government.
During the Uruguay Round New Zealand’s trade representative in Geneva ( now spokesperson on trade in New Zealand’s incoming government), Tim Groser, championed an approach to future multilateral trade negotiations that recognised the domestic source of the problems threatening progress in the World Trade Organization. For its part, the Australian government recently commissioned a review of trade policy by David Mortimer, before deciding how it should meet its commitment to support the WTO – its highest trade policy priority. The Mortimer report is now with the Australian government.
The release of the report coincides with an international review by the WTO of the way forward, initiated by Director-General Lamy. Both reviews have occurred at a time when progress in opening world markets through multilateral trade negotiations has stalled.
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Author: Bill Carmichael, Former Chairman, Industries Assistance Commission
In their analysis of the difficulties facing the WTO in opening markets for services, Philippa Dee and Christopher Findlay point to the need for domestic transparency arrangements to focus attention, within participating countries, on the benefits of reducing their own barriers. A recent WTO study has explained why the need for such arrangements is not limited to services, but is the basis for restoring progress in all areas of trade included in multilateral negotiations.
After reviewing the experience of forty-five member countries, the major conclusion of the WTO study is that the outcomes from multilateral trade negotiations depend on decisions taken by individual governments at home, about their own trade barriers, and reflects the interaction between private interest groups and national decision-making:
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