Author: Wendy Dobson, University of Toronto
With no clear leader and few strong incentives for deep integration, Asian cooperation for the foreseeable future is likely to be intergovernmental, with little pooling of sovereignty to create supranational institutions or agree common rules and disciplines.
As Asia’s weight in the world economy grows, however, its interests will also be served by a strong commitment to global institutions. Read more…
Author: Raymond Trewin, ANU
Trade bans often signal a lack of ideas or an attempt to constrain market forces, driven by the more vocal or influential rather than evidence-based policy analysis.
The recent proposed ban on livestock exports to Indonesia seems a prime example of this situation, with a ‘NineMSN’ survey of the issue indicating more than 50 per cent of respondents are against the ban. Read more…
Authors: Malcolm Bosworth and Greg Cutbush, ANU Enterprise
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her Government’s ‘Trading Our Way to Prosperity’ statement (in response to the Productivity Commission’s Report on Bilateral and Regional Trade Arrangements) is commendable.
It rejected Australia’s regrettable preoccupation with preferential trade agreements (PTAs), and heeded the Productivity Commission’s advice that trade policy should be reviewed against the ‘principles of unilateralism, non-discrimination, transparency’, and ‘the grand unifying principle of trade policy as an indivisible part of overall economic reform’. Read more…
Author: Neville R. Norman, University of Melbourne
Australia’s experience in recent decades shows that significant trade liberalisation can be achieved if providential economy-wide conditions, professional exposition and adjustment assistance accompany the political will to deliver it.
In July 1973, severe excess demand favoured such policies as the 25 per cent all-tariff reduction; however, it was the sudden reversal of these conditions in 1974 that led to tariff, quota and exchange-rate protectionism that was greater than before the change. Concurrently, the then-Government had lost most of its political majority and failed to effectively answer public critics who confused macro and trade policy effects. Read more…
Author: Philippa Dee, ANU and Shiro Armstrong, ANU, Columbia University
The Doha Development Round of World Trade Organisation trade negotiations is in deep trouble and could become the first Round to fail.
What will happen if Doha fails? Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, ANU
So what’s the problem? Does it matter if the WTO’s Doha Round is prematurely pronounced dead?
For Asia and the Pacific, it matters, seriously. Read more…
Author: Ed Gresser, GlobalWorks Foundation
It looks like Doha is heading for its first ever round failure, unless there is a big rescue operation directed by presidents and prime ministers — above all, those of the United States and China — or a partial salvaging as former U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab recommends.
This would be the first abandoned Round since multilateral trade negotiations were invented in 1947. This raises three basic questions: why this stalemate? What does it mean for trade and the global economy? And can/should anything new be done? Read more…
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: Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University
The Doha Round, the first multilateral trade negotiation conducted under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, is at a critical stage. Now in their 10th year, with much negotiated, the talks need a final political nudge, lest Doha — and hence the WTO — disappear from the world’s radar screen.
Indeed, the danger is already real: when I was in Geneva a year ago and staying at the upscale Mandarin Oriental, I asked the concierge how far away the WTO was. He looked at me and asked: ‘Is the World Trade Organization a travel agency?’ Read more…
Author: Cyn-Young Park, ADB
The global financial crisis has prompted a wide range of policy responses and long-overdue reform initiatives, implemented by an unprecedented degree of intergovernmental policy coordination to build a collective response — not just between large, advanced economies but with strong participation from emerging market economies, too.
The world economy has turned a corner, but the challenges it faces remain daunting. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, EAF
The idea of a Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, at least among the nine Asia Pacific countries that are currently signed up for the negotiations, has been hyped up over the last year as the Obama administration declared it to be the way forward on a new American engagement with Asia.
The TPP initiative — which includes Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and the United States — now tops Washington’s trade agenda barring the unfinished business of FTAs with Korea, Colombia and Panama. Read more…
Author: Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University
The Doha Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations (MTN) is the first negotiation to take place under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO), founded in 1995.
The eight previous rounds of global trade talks were conducted under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), following its creation in 1947. Read more…
Author: Mukul G. Asher, NUS, and Rahul Sen, AUT
As part of a broader objective of deeper economic integration with Asia, New Zealand embarked last year on negotiating a preferential trade agreement (PTA) with India, one of the rapidly growing emerging markets in Asia.
Three rounds of negotiations have now been completed, with the fourth round of negotiations scheduled in New Delhi this month. Read more…
Author: Geethanjali Nataraj, NCAER
The proliferation of regional trade agreements has continued unabated since the early 1990s. In recent years, this has led to widespread debate on the advantages or disadvantages of regionalism over multilateralism.
The debate stems from the increased use of regional trade agreements (RTAs) in a world now ruled by an improved and disciplined multilateral trading system. Read more…
Author: Razeen Sally, ECIPE and LSE
World trade is recovering from its steepest fall since the 1930s — part of the biggest ‘deglobalisation’ since the Great Depression. Trade liberalisation has stalled globally and there is a climate of defensiveness on trade policy.
The West’s financial crisis translates into a deeper-than-normal recession and a slower-than-average recovery. In contrast, most emerging markets retained reasonably solid banks and balance sheets. That enabled them to rebound quickly, not least through fast ‘reglobalisation.’
Read more…
