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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Author: Denis Hussey, Chairman, Tasman Transparency Group
With the threat of countries retreating to protectionism in the wake of the global financial crisis, the G20 and APEC leaders’ commitment to support multilateral trade liberalisation is welcome and timely. However, announcing that commitment is the easy part. Rudd returns home now to digest the Mortimer Review and to implement the domestic reforms needed to help us continue to reap the gains from globalisation. He has the additional complementary challenge, and opportunity, to sponsor an approach that would give substance to the G20 commitment to open world markets.
Following the release of the Mortimer Review and the additional analysis on the East Asia Forum, the Australian Financial Review on 25 November 2008 offered the following editorial comment:
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Author: Saul Eslake, Chief Economist, ANZ Banking Group
After committing Australia to support the G20 goal of opening world markets, a commitment re-affirmed by Trade Minister Crean last week in Peru, Prime Minister Rudd has returned home to consider his government’s response to the Mortimer review of our own trade policy.
The G20 objective is just that—an objective. It will only become more if a way to implement it can be introduced into the WTO.
The document prepared with our two New Zealand colleagues explained why the Mortimer review does not help Prime Minister Rudd meet his commitment to support the WTO. It has the same relevance for the G20 objective. Any strategy to restore progress in the multilateral system must provide a basis for reducing the conflict, so evident in the Doha Round, between the two separate processes involved in multilateral trade reform.
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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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Guest Author: Denis Hussey, Tasman Transparency Group
Philippa Dee and Christopher Findlay have correctly identified the issues facing the WTO in dealing with ‘behind-the-border’ barriers, the major impediments to trade in services. Their approach recognizes that reform of these barriers requires a domestic transparency process operating in (and by) individual WTO countries.
The approach they advocate is of major importance in enhancing the domestic benefits for countries participating in multilateral trade negotiations, and for the future of the WTO system. ‘Behind-the-border’ barriers often apply at a regional or provincial level, and are therefore quite unlikely to reach the negotiating table unless the national ‘offers’ governments take to negotiations in Geneva are consciously structured to include these non-transparent barriers to trade.
The WTO has no authority to deal with these barriers. Read more…
Author: Christopher Findlay
The WTO’s contribution to services reform is through its principles not its processes. Its processes exaggerate the anxieties which are impeding its own progress. We call for more effort to change services policy from opaque to transparent and to bring home the benefits of domestic reform.
The argument is set out below in and edited extract from my paper with Philippa Dee called Services: A ‘Deal-Maker’ in the Doha Round?, Chapter 3 in Monitoring Trade Policy: A New Agenda for Reviving the Doha Round [pdf] which includes contributions from Patrick Messerlin, Alan Deardorff, Robert Stern, Bruce Blonigen and John Whalley.
[In the mean time, the Mortimer review and its issues paper are well worth checking out for services trade. The review is due to report on 31 August]
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